The Six Doctors
by PencilGuardian
Summary: 9thOC, AU Pre'Rose' The Ninth Doctor meets himself in an alternate dimension. PART 42
1. Part One

The room was dark. There were lights high above her head in the domed ceiling, but they had long since burned out and been forgotten. Black tendrils of ivy crawled over and around each other up the walls, strangling what few bulbs still struggled to work. Miranda took a step forward, baseball bat in one hand, a heavy sack in the other, her trainers crunching on years' worth of unchecked ivy growth. The small sound became unbearably loud as it echoed through the chamber, and she heard several small noises respond from different points in the ivy. She winced. Big, clumsy human feet. No help for it, unfortunately.

PLOIMP!

Miranda jumped. There was water in here. She tiptoed forward to the edge of a round...pond? She leaned over and poked the dark surface. Ripples spread out, disturbing the carpet of algae on the surface, exposing several patches of dark water. Looking closely, she was just barely able to make out moving silhouettes beneath the surface.

PLOIMP!

A large bubble, roiling up from the depths, erupted near the far edge, followed by a dark shape with fins that briefly broke the surface, then disappeared just as quickly. Miranda stepped back from the edge as a precaution. She hoped it was nothing more sinister than carp. Either way, she didn't think her quarry could swim. Now, to locate that rustling...

BEEP BEEP BOP BEEP...

Miranda dropped the sack and fumbled in her pocket for her cell. So much for stealth. "Where are you?" a male voice crackled brusquely through the line, filling the chamber with harsh echoes.

"Close," she snapped back for what had to have been the tenth time in as many minutes.

"But where exactly? Last thing I need is for you to get excited and start smashing something important."

"Well, don't worry, all that's near me right now is the fish pond."

"Pond...? Ah, the swimming pool! Haven't been that way in ages."

Miranda looked at the swampy water in disgust. "Oh, that's vile," she remarked aloud. "Where're you?"

"I'm uh..." his voice trailed off momentarily. "Let's see...glowing bundles of cable, big flashy orb-things all over the floor...a unicycle? When did I ever have a unicycle?" --Miranda rolled her eyes-- "Well, I don't see any of 'em in here. What've you got?"

"Stand by..." she murmured, flipping the phone shut and pocketing it, eyes trained on a rustle in the ivy a few feet to her right. She crouched slowly and picked up her sack and then began creeping towards the movement. Flipping the bat upside down, she clenched the rubber grip tightly as she stalked it. Peering close, her eyes finally began adjusting to the gloom. She saw the gleam of little eyes and pounced.

As the bat hit home, an awful little squeal erupted from the viney overgrowth and several small furry creatures leaped clear and disappeared. "Ah, crap! There's a nest!" she groused, kneeling to pick up the stunned little critter that she'd struck. Stunned or dead, she couldn't tell for sure. She straightened and dropped it into the sack. She set the bat down and pulled out her cell.

"What'd you find?" the male voice asked at the press of a button.

"Oh, found one of 'em, but I think they've got a nest in here now," she commented mildly.

"That's it, Miranda, no more pets!"

"For the eight hundreth time, Doctor, they're not pets!" She shook a loose strand of hair out of her face and composed herself, fighting the irritation that brimmed so close to the surface these days. "I would have neutered them if they were."

"Still, a whole year studying an alien world, and you bring back the rats?"

"Don't start with that! You were a scientist once. You have the choice of spending your limited anthropological time studying diverse and numerous unknown human cultures or the local fauna. I had to prioritize! How was I supposed to know that your funky mood lighting would stimulate their mating drive, causing them to chew through the cages--which I told you were inadequate two weeks ago, I might add--and proliferate over half the TARDIS? Excuuuuse me for not anticipating that!"

"Oy! You're not putting this on me! I never gave you permission to bring them on in the first place! Travel through space and time? Sure. Infest my TARDIS with little crawling disease-pots? No."

"They weren't diseased when I brought them on. Anything they might have now would have had to come from your TARDIS. Anyway, how come is it that the great and powerful Timelord sees an ounce of fur with feet and freaks out? We would've had them by now if you hadn't spooked them."

"You try being locked in a room with plague rats and you'll understand."

Miranda's response was delayed when she realized the voice was coming from the archway instead of the cell phone. She glared at his lanky form, hidden inside that beat-up leather jacket, and put the phone away. "Was that before or after you wrote Hamlet? I keep forgetting," she drawled.

He merely produced that horrid, cheeky grin and crunched over the ivy, into the room. "After." He strolled to the water's edge and eyed it curiously. "At least, I think this should be the swimming pool." The large aquatic critter Miranda had spotted earlier made another appearance and another large bubble. The Doctor made a face and stepped back, almost colliding with Miranda, who had strolled up behind him to watch. "Wouldn't stand too close," he advised.

"D'you suppose that thing's a meat-eater?" Miranda wondered aloud, hefting her rodent sack in jest.

The Doctor studied the gently fading ripples, scratching his very short hair. "Dunno." He looked down at her. "Dip a toe, see what happens." Miranda elbowed him in the ribs. "Ow!" the Doctor protested, pretending insult as much as pain.

"Anyway, shouldn't we be mouse hunting?" Miranda moved away from the water's edge, noting all the little rustling movements she could see in the ivy on the floor. She hoped they were all caused by nothing more sinister than her rats. There were parts of this TARDIS that she knew not even the Doctor had fully explored.

"Could just seal off this part of the TARDIS and flood it with toxic gas, you know," he remarked off-handedly, following her through the ivy.

"Not a nature lover, eh?" Miranda quipped. "Anyway, all we really need is to pick up a few dozen traps."

The Doctor suddenly pounced into the ivy and when he stood up again, he had one of the critters dangling by its tail. "Nature's fine. Love nature," he insisted quickly. "Outside, that is. Inside, nature's nothing but a pest," he clarified, wagging a disciplinary finger at the little creature. "Aren't you?" Unexpectedly, he tossed it towards Miranda. Thinking fast, she opened her sack and caught the squealing animal before it would have landed in her face.

"You were directing that last comment at the rat, right?" Miranda asked.

The Doctor stopped short and snapped his fingers. "Traps! That's what we need!"

"The TARDIS doesn't have any. I checked the inventory, such as it is. I also searched several of the storerooms."

"Impossible!"

"You think I'm swinging this stupid bat around just for fun?" Miranda groused, following the Doctor's long-legged march out of the room into the greenish light of the corridor, pulling the door shut tightly behind her.

"I'm sure I had a few live traps tucked somewhere. Must've done."

"Oh sure, since the TARDIS is just chock-full of other sensible things, like unicycles and swimming pools."

"Whatever you did on that vacation of yours, it certainly didn't improve your mood any," the Doctor commented mildly.

Miranda's hand automatically clenched the grip of her bat. She knew he was only joking, but it did her residual raw nerves no good to be reminded of the past year. Everything about it had been the exact opposite of relaxing, and she strongly suspected the Doctor knew that much, though hopefully no more. She was so edgy, how could he not have picked up on it? She forced her angry response deep down with the rest of her emotional rubbish and loosened her hold of the bat. "Sorry. You were saying something about having live traps--?"

The rest of her question was jarred from her mind and mouth as the floor pitched sharply and she slammed face-first into the bulkhead. She dropped the rat sack and heard the aluminium bat go clanging down the corridor, then felt her back slam solidly into something that stopped her cold. Head swimming, she sat up from where she'd rebounded onto the floor, her face stinging, and realized she'd lost her glasses.


	2. Part Two

"C'mon!" the Doctor exclaimed, grabbing her arm to pull her vertical. The floor swayed and shimmied sickeningly, accompanied by a chorus of protesting groans and rattles from within the TARDIS, tossing the Doctor back against the bulkhead and throwing Miranda against his legs. Something small clattered into her lap. Her glasses!

"Did we hit something?" she asked, shoving the slightly bent specs back onto her face.

"Shouldn't have." The Doctor grabbed her arm again and helped her to her feet before sprinting off down the corridor towards the console room.

"Coming!" Miranda hollered after him pointlessly, hurrying as fast as she could in his wake. Unfortunately, after a year on solid planet surface her TARDIS legs were decidedly out of shape and her urgent running was more a drunken stagger. By the time she lurched into the console room, the Doctor was controlled chaos at the hexagonal panels, turning knobs and landing the occasional fist to the controls, but it was working. The TARDIS was once more sailing smoothly. Or so it felt, at least. But Miranda knew better than to expect it was just passing turbulence.

The frame of the timeship shuddered, unsettling Miranda enough that she grabbed the railing just in case. "Sensible things like seatbelts would help too, you know," she felt fit to remark. The Doctor shot her a look from the other side of the console, so Miranda smirked at him. Briefly, the Doctor flashed his megawatt grin in return before an insistent beeping from another panel drew his attention.

"Can I help?" she queried as the TARDIS continued its queasy rocking.

"You are."

"How?"

"By standing clear and not touching anything."

"You're welcome."

The TARDIS gave a particularly rough shake, encouraging Miranda to grip the railing tightly. "What is this?" she groused.

The Doctor flipped a series of switches, paying close attention to their effect, which seemed negligible to Miranda. "Press the yellow button!" he ordered suddenly from his side of the console.

Miranda jumped down from the catwalk to the console and looked over the mishmash of gadgetry. "Where?"

"Beside the quantiscope!"

"The what-scope? Oh, here!" Glancing underneath the panel, she spotted a large, glowing yellow button. It was the only yellow button she saw, so she smacked it hard with her palm. She didn't know why the Doctor kept trying to explain things to her in terms of Timelord techno babble. Quantiscope? 'Yellow button under the panel' she understood. "Got it!"

"Keep pressing it!" the Doctor jumped to a different panel and gave an instrument a good twist. The shaking and shuddering and rattling of the TARDIS suddenly subsided, as Miranda and the Doctor both stood still and waited. Well, the Doctor stood. Miranda was stuck crouching so she could keep her hand on the button. It reminded Miranda of the three weeks she'd spent on Hurndas, where turbulence was so commonplace from the air foils suspending their landmasses above the molten surface that the entire village would simply stop what they were doing and sit down, calmly waiting out each aftershock.

Hurndas...she hadn't thought about that little trip in quite a while. It had been her first solo trip to an alien planet, what, nearly three years ago by now? So very long ago, it seemed.

Whatever the yellow button was for, it seemed to do the trick. The TARDIS settled down, and the only sound was its usual, ambient humming. And the equine-in-distress wheezing of the time rotor.

"Can I--?"

"Yes, you can let go," the Doctor cut her off confidently. Miranda stood up, seeing the Doctor once again grinning like a satisfied cat.

"That was some turbulence," Miranda remarked, loathe to feel any stupider by asking 'what is it' a third time. "What happened? Some kind of temporal distortion?" she suggested instead, recalling the circumstances around their first meeting.

"Of a kind. We've been pulled out of the vortex by something. The TARDIS is caught," the Doctor looked slightly bemused.

"Caught how? Wouldn't that take a lot of energy?" Miranda asked.

"Massive amounts! Like..." the Doctor gestured her over to the scanner. Miranda rounded the console and joined him at the screen, which was displaying nothing more impressive than a series of concentric rings, with a long column of meaningless numbers along one side, the values changing faster than Miranda could follow. "...like those produced in a time corridor," he intoned decisively.

"Time corridor. Right," Miranda agreed, making little effort to cover her ignorance (How much did he expect an anthropologist to know about temporal physics?).

"It's like a tunnel in the fabric of the universe, connects two points in space-time."

"Oh, like an Einstein-Rosen bridge! A wormhole," Miranda realized (the one thing she happened to remember out of 'A Brief History of Time').

The Doctor actually looked somewhat impressed. "Sort of, except that this is not a natural phenomenon." He glanced at her suggestively.

"You don't mean…"

He gave her a knowing look.

"Don't even--"

"Aliens!" he announced with entirely too much certainty for Miranda's liking.

She made a show of rolling her eyes and sulking against the console. She was long used to these interruptions, but that didn't make them any less enjoyable. She hated sticking her nose into weird, possibly dangerous situations. Well, perhaps 'hate' was too strong a word. She certainly didn't look forward to them, in any case. "Which aliens?" she asked, knowing he was waiting for the question. When the answer didn't come right away, she looked at the Doctor.

To her surprise, he was eyeing the scanner with a deeply serious expression, the fingers of one hand drumming restlessly on the console.

"You can't get the TARDIS out of it, can you?" Miranda surmised.

"No, we'll have to ride the time stream to its exit vector." He still sounded troubled, but not about that.

"You've done that with the TARDIS before?"

He gave her a look that Miranda immediately recognized, and set about fiddling with the controls again, changing the scanner display several times.

"Do you know where the corridor leads?" she asked inoffensively. "Where are we going?"

"Dunno," he answered simply.

"What? If we're following a specific vector, why can't the TARDIS-?"

"That's just the problem. It doesn't seem to have an exit. Nor an entrance. Not one the TARDIS can detect, anyway. It looks as though it transects the entire universe! That shouldn't be possible. The amount of power it would take to project an energy barrier across all of space-time--can't be done. Well, I suppose in theory...but where's the point of origin?"

"So we're stuck in a time corridor with no origin and no endpoint? How'd we get in?" Miranda asked, attempting to draw the Doctor out of his private brainstorming session.

"Dunno. There wasn't any trace of it a moment ago, then Wham! Here it is, and here's us stuck in it."

The TARDIS shuddered mildly again, but this time in a way that was quite familiar. The rotor wheezed and went silent. "Did we just land?" Miranda asked anyway.

The Doctor checked the instruments. Then rechecked them. Then knit his brows together.

"What? Where did we land?" Miranda was getting annoyed with this idiotic round of 'Twenty Questions.' As if goading her, the Doctor seemed to ignore her completely and continued to fiddle with the controls in bemusement. Miranda tugged on his jacket sleeve. "Doctor! Where are we?"

The Doctor stopped playing with the levers and switches and drummed his fingertips on the panel. Then he grinned at Miranda, and whirled past her, legging it towards the doors. "Well, let's find out, shall we?" he called back to her.

"But shouldn't we have the TARDIS scan it first? Make sure we can, you know, breathe out there?" Miranda protested, catching him up at the TARDIS doors before he could open them.

"Aw, that would only spoil the satisfaction of finding it out first-hand!" He reached for the knob.

Miranda placed a restraining hand on his sleeve. "Versus the agonizing death throes you'll experience if you can't?"

The Doctor pinched the bridge of his beaked nose in exasperation. "Timid little Miranda! Of course I scanned it first! Just trying to engage your spontaneity. But that's right; you haven't got any. How stupid of me."

"So what did the scanner say? Where are we?" Miranda persisted.

The Doctor produced his sonic screwdriver from his jacket pocket and twirled it. "Dunno," he answered, grinning, popping the door open and stepping out of the TARDIS.

Miranda watched him stride out into what appeared to be a decidedly ordinary countryside. But after no more than a step out of the TARDIS, he suddenly grabbed his head and sank to the grass with a painful moan.


	3. Part Three

"Doctor!" Miranda pulled the TARDIS door shut behind her and intended to go to him, but as soon as she left the deceptive confines of the blue police box, she was overcome by the weirdest sensation she'd ever felt. It was as though everything around her had simply ground to a halt. She saw her foot hang in the air just above the grass, her hand poised, statuesque, towards the Doctor.

She saw the Doctor, just in front of her on his knees, the hem of his leather jacket flared out from movement but frozen, not falling straight, his fingers pressed into the sides of his head but impossibly still. The grass his dark shoes had depressed remained so, a perfect footprint.

Not a single molecule of air seemed to move past Miranda's skin. She felt her hair, pulled into two braids, pulled back off her shoulders when she rushed out of the TARDIS, and still hanging suspended in the air. It was as if she'd been turned to stone. A sentient statue, frozen in a millisecond of time.

Then, in front of her unblinking, unmovable eyes, she saw a fly. An ordinary housefly, small and black. It was flying. She could see each flap of its wings, felt the very slight touch of disturbed air against her face. It passed before her in an eternity, the time between wing flaps stretching on and on. As it passed beyond her fixed realm of vision, Miranda tried to follow it with her eyes. The world swam as first her eyes, then her head, began to change position, tracking the flight of the small insect.

Miranda blinked, and it seemed as though an entire night passed before her lids opened again. When they did, she noticed that the Doctor was now sitting some feet away from where he had fallen, palms pressed against his forehead, mouth twisted in a pained grimace. But he was no longer frozen in place. She could see the wrinkles in his leather jacket changing as he made slight movements.

Maybe that meant she could move, as well. Miranda only intended to set her foot down, completing the step she'd begun that long moment ago, but something went wrong, and her vision became a blur of colors and shapes. She felt weightless, then saw black, her face pressed into a prickly, cool surface. The grass. She'd fallen face-first into the grass.

As if on a delayed circuit, the rest of her body seemed to wake up, and she felt the fall reverberate through her joints, particularly in her wrists. She must have tried to stop herself with her hands. Her palms felt scraped, for that matter. The little bit of pain went a long way towards clearing the fog in her head. She pushed herself up off the grass and stood up. Her movements were jerky, like her muscles were acting one step ahead of her brain. She staggered on the gentle slope.

"Doctor, are you alright?" Miranda asked, surprised how slurred her voice sounded.

The Doctor looked like he was in real physical pain, a hand pressed to his chest. "Agh," he groaned. "Time's wrong. Can feel it in every molecule of my being." He crumpled forward onto his elbows and knees, facedown in obvious distress.

The motion left trails in Miranda's eyes, faded ghost images forming and changing to catch up with the action. Miranda tried to blink them away. Like that one time in college she let herself be talked into smoking a joint. But this was frightening. Miranda couldn't imagine what it must be like for the Doctor. Nevertheless, she staggered over and sat down beside him.

"Can I help at all?"

SNAP! CRZZZ!

Miranda felt a heat blast against her back that tickled her neck. The Doctor's head jerked up, and he looked past Miranda, wide-eyed. "No!" he yelled unexpectedly, on his feet, stumbling past her towards the TARDIS.

Or rather, to where the TARDIS had been a moment ago. All that was left was a rapidly dissipating column of smoke. No dust, no debris, no TARDIS. For the first time in a long while, Miranda felt a cold stab of true panic. She looked frantically for the source of whatever it was that had just vaporized her way out, expecting big, nasty aliens with big, nasty guns. Her eyes were adjusting to this place, but all she saw in the drippy countryside was some kind of farmhouse in the distance.

The Doctor stood (a bit unsteadily) in the place where the TARDIS had been, unmoving. Miranda stumbled over and eyed him warily. She'd seen that particular blend of shock and anger on the Doctor's face before, and she was never sure how far she could trust him when he wore it. Like looking down into an active volcano, risking that it won't chose that exact moment to explode.

"Th–they just blew up the TARDIS!" she realized, letting it sink in as the sharp tang of ozone assaulted her nostrils. She was afraid she might be sick.

"No, it was taken."

Miranda looked at the Doctor and watched as the fury drained from his eyes, leaving emptiness in its place. "Taken?" she repeated, seizing a glimmer of hope.

The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver again and activated it, sweeping the air around them. Here and there, she saw glimmers of green light, like coloured dust motes. "Photon excitation. It was some kind of teleport device. A transmat," he said grimly.

"Well there's a house over there," Miranda pointed sightlessly, not wanting to risk turning her head and taking another dive into the dirt.

The Doctor looked, glanced at Miranda and smiled happily, pocketing the screwdriver and clapping her on the shoulder. "That's the spirit! What say we meet the neighbours? Lead on!"

Miranda forgot how exhausting his mood swings could be.

The Doctor kept his hand on Miranda's shoulder and leaned on her as they started walking towards the house. Miranda was still unsteady on her feet, but evidently the Doctor was a bit worse off. Unsure of herself, Miranda began leading the way down the gentle slope, towards the house.

"What's wrong with this place? Are we drugged?" she asked. The heavy-twitchy sensation hadn't gone away, and in concentrating on where she was putting her feet, she slurred her words badly.

"It's dimensional sensory confusion," the Doctor answered.

"What--?"

"I think we've been pulled into a different temporal dimension."

"How--?"

"I'll explain later."

"Where do you come up with this stuff, Doctor?"

"I get around. Been to a few other dimensions, me."

"You are so full of it." Starting up the next gentle incline, Miranda tripped over an exposed rock and nearly sent the both of them tumbling.

"Oy! Mind your step!" the Doctor groused.

"You wanna drive?"

"Just watch where you're stepping, yeah?"

"I would if I could actually see my feet when I walk!" Miranda composed herself and started walking up the hill more slowly, so her eyes could follow the shifting terrain more easily. "You're just as bad, aren't you?"

"We'll adapt to it eventually. It's already getting easier for you, isn't it?"

"I guess, if feeling drunk is an improvement over feeling high." Miranda's toes suddenly clipped the edge of an asphalt road that lay at the crest of the hill.

"What is it?" the Doctor asked.

"There's a road," Miranda said, keeping her eyes open and unmoving so they could focus. The asphalt was a black, serpentine line that led straight to the hedged gate of the house. It was bigger than she first thought, like a manor. A wooden fence marked the opposite side of the road. "For another dimension it looks awful homey, don't you think?"

"How do you mean?" the Doctor asked.

Miranda stepped onto the road and immediately felt surer of herself. The Doctor could only trip after her, still grimacing a bit, as if he were forced to look into full sunlight.

A cold breeze caused Miranda to shiver involuntarily. What a dreary day it was, wherever they were. "Very English countryside, what with the fields and fence and such," Miranda commented.

"How is that 'homey'?"

He had a point there. Miranda was an American city-dweller herself, and her comrade was a vagabond alien who lived in an ancient time ship. "Never mind. I just hope somebody's home and knows where the TARDIS went."

"And is willing to say so without a lot of undue running round and proclamations of 'you'll never get out alive, ha ha,' right?"

"Yeah, that too. Though with you involved I'm sure as hell not holding my breath."

"That's the spirit! Stand ready for anything!"

"Spirit? Resignation's more like it."


	4. Part Four

By the time they had reached the shade trees bordering the road in front of the gate, Miranda had adjusted to the strange effects of the environment, and as long as she was conscious of her movements and thought them through, she could manage almost normally.

"Looks like oak trees. Where are we?" she wondered aloud. The place looked very, very Earthbound. "Doctor, these other temporal dimensions, do they exist all the time, like, overlaid on the four dimensions we're used to, or is it like in theoretical physics, with micro dimensions and inner space and all that? I mean, this place looks like Earth. Did the TARDIS just happen to slip us into a higher temporal plane or something?"

The Doctor spared a moment from his grimacing to stare at her in bewilderment. "Where did all that come from?"

"What? Can't a girl brush up on her quantum physics now and then?"

For some reason, the Doctor didn't find seem to find that very amusing. "Just ring the bell, would you?"

"Now who's the grouch?" Miranda muttered, shoving off the Doctor's hand and thoughtlessly heading alone towards the gate. "Wait a minute!" She stopped and walked back to the Doctor. "Why am I approaching the door of a possibly booby-trapped, evil manor house all by myself? We're ringing that bell together!" She grabbed the Doctor's hand and forced him to follow her to the gate.

"You almost did it," the Doctor jibed.

"I'm not thinking clearly. Temporal confusion or whatever."

"Admit it!"

"No."

"Come on, you know it's true."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Doctor."

"You're brave, Miranda. If you'd stop thinking yourself in circles--"

"I do not! I analyze the situation, weigh all the risks, consider my options…"

"And run screaming into the TARDIS like a--"

"Only that one time, and I don't see a bell."

"No, neither do I." The Doctor stepped around her and examined the weathered iron bars and crumbly brickwork. He wrapped his long fingers around one of the bars. The gate swung inward with a well-oiled squeak. No explosives were triggered, no alarms went off and no nasty aliens or space Nazis appeared at the top of the brick wall to arrest them. Yet.

The Doctor looked at Miranda and shrugged. She shrugged back noncommittally. He pushed the gate open all the way and stepped inside the yard. Miranda waited a bit longer until she was confident there were no security measures waiting to kill him, and followed. A brick walkway connected the gate to the main door. The house looked old, with peeling paint and cracked windowsills, but still maintained vestiges of faded grandeur.

"Looks like an old plantation house. Antebellum, you know?" Miranda observed.

"Let's see who's home." The Doctor headed up the walk towards the front door at a brisk, confident jaunt–until a large quantity of dirt and rocks fell onto his head from the adjacent shade tree. The Doctor dropped to his knees and shielded his head and Miranda jumped back, startled. She looked up at the tree, but it was large and had thick foliage that looked almost black in the overcast weather, hiding whatever trap the Doctor had sprung.

She saw a flash of movement at the periphery of her vision and she looked down in time to see a figure in a shabby overcoat and absurdly large hat peeking out from the corner of the house. Miranda made eye contact, but before she could call out to him, the figure flashed a huge, toothy grin and vanished around the side of the manor. She heard the Doctor spitting dirt and fussing, drawing her attention back to the problem at hand.

"Are you alright?" she asked. She looked up into the tree once more, and then stepped beneath it, behind the Doctor. The debris appeared to have been mostly dirt clods, twigs and small pebbles. Nothing terribly dangerous, not at the short distance it had fallen.

The Doctor spat several times and flapped his jacket vigorously, spraying dirt from its creases in all directions. Miranda timidly brushed a few dead leaves off of his head, trying to be helpful. The Doctor stood up and ran both hands over his hair rapidly. "What was that about?" he wondered aloud, looking up into the tree curiously. She watched him look over the tree quickly, and then pick up a broken piece of twine lying by his foot.

Only then did Miranda notice that the twine hung down the trunk of the tree, wound around a metal staple in the ground that looked like it came from a croquet set, and stretched across the walkway where it was tied to another metal staple. The Doctor had evidently tripped it with his foot. The Doctor stared at the frayed end in his hand in such complete astonishment that Miranda had the sudden urge to laugh at him. "Simple elegance," she remarked instead.

"How could I have missed a tripwire?" the Doctor exclaimed, obviously paying Miranda no mind, "I know why, because nobody uses tripwires. It's antiquated. Naff, even. Why would someone…?"

The Doctor continued his rambling, but Miranda ignored him. That weirdo in the hat was back, watching them from the corner of the house again. "Doctor?" Miranda tried to get his attention subtly, but he was long gone on his speculative rant. The strange man once again made eye contact with her, but instead of fleeing, this time he beckoned to her with one finger. Miranda pointed to herself questioningly, making sure she understood him. The man nodded, baring his teeth again, in a big grin not completely unlike the Doctor's; that is to say, he looked slightly mad. Miranda glanced at the Doctor, but he was on the other side of the tree:

"…I suppose it has a certain charm to it, but if you're going to set such an obvious trap, why not do it right and make sure it gets the job done? This is just poor workmanship…"

Time to be brave, Miranda decided, leaving the brick walk and approaching the man at the side of the house. He waved encouragingly. Puzzled by his coy behaviour, Miranda waved back. She stepped over a flowerbed and was about to say something to the man, when the ground gave way beneath her sneakers.

She barely had time to get out a decent yelp of surprise before she landed on the bottom and had the wind knocked out of her. She felt sticks and damp wads of grass fall on her from above, but she was too busy struggling for breath to worry about it. Through teary eyes and smudged glasses, she saw the strange man staring down at her from the top of the hole. As if from under water, she heard an unfamiliar voice yell something, and the man scampered away.

At last, the swelling knot in her chest began to recede and Miranda almost choked on a desperate gasp, inhaling dirt and grass. Rolling onto her side in the cramped hole, she coughed.

"Are you alright?" a slightly nasal tenor inquired from above.

Miranda wiped grime from her face and glasses and saw another unfamiliar man standing at the edge of the hole, light brown curls brushing the shoulders of his prim, brown jacket as he leaned down.

"Yeah, I think so," Miranda wheezed, climbing to her feet. The hole was deeper than the quick fall had suggested. Standing up, she could just grab the top edge with her fingertips, not enough leverage to get out on her own.

"Here, take my hand," the man offered.

"Thanks," Miranda accepted. She grabbed both of his forearms and struggled unsuccessfully to find purchase for her feet, to climb out. But whoever had crafted the pit had done so with archaeological precision. The wall was perfectly straight and smooth. She felt a bit guilty that her rescuer ended up pulling her out of the hole by her arms with sheer strength. He fell backwards onto the grass with an undignified grunt of effort, taking Miranda with him. For a moment she was disinclined to move off of him, still breathless and feeling as though her arms were out of socket.

"Am I interrupting something?" the Doctor inquired mildly from somewhere nearby.

Miranda scrambled off of her rescuer and brushed off her shorts and tee shirt. "What? No! I was just–here, let me help." She stopped mid-explanation to offer a hand to her rescuer, who gratefully took it in order to get up from the grass. "Thanks," she said to him.

"No problem." The man casually dusted off his Victorian dress coat and smiled pleasantly. Miranda finally acknowledged the Doctor. "I fell. He–"

The Doctor's expression stopped her cold. He was staring fixedly at the other man in utter disbelief. Miranda turned back to the genial stranger. He seemed neither put off nor surprised by the Doctor's wordless reaction. He regarded Miranda again. "You're unharmed, I trust, Miss…?"

"Miranda. Not Miss Miranda, that's my first name. Just call me Miranda," she stammered somewhat stupidly, disarmed by his unexpected chivalry.

"Miranda. A pleasure. I," the stranger addressed them significantly, "am the Doctor."


	5. Part Five

Miranda hesitated deliberately, not sure what conclusions, if any, she could draw from that. "Doctor…?" she prodded hopefully.

The stranger's smile grew knowing. "Just the Doctor."

"As in, capital 'D'?"

"I suppose you could put it like that, yes," the stranger affirmed, clearly starting to enjoy her confusion.

For some reason, Miranda got the impression that this fellow had danced to this tune before, and was only waiting for her and the Doctor to complete the steps. She looked away from the stranger, to the Doctor, who was still eyeing the man with a volatile mixture of suspicion and confusion. For the first time since she'd known him, the Doctor appeared at a complete loss for words. The silence began to grow awkward for Miranda. "Uh, well, that's really funny, 'cos it so happens that my friend here also calls himself Doctor. That's an odd coincidence, isn't it?" She surreptitiously tugged on the Doctor's leather jacket, eyeing him. "Isn't it?"

"Something is very wrong here. What's going on?" the Doctor spoke up finally, his eyes never wavering from those of the stranger.

"I think we ought to go inside, actually," the stranger chirped mildly, indicating the brick walkway to the front door. "Best if you two followed me, I think. The old chap's probably laid a few other surprises between here and the door."

Miranda began to feel the situation sliding away from her. Clearly the Doctor knew who this man was, and there was no doubt the other man knew the Doctor knew, so why was he (the other man) acting so nonchalantly about it, when the Doctor looked about to blow a gasket? Miranda's mind fled back a year, to that tense standoff she'd witnessed in the console room…the only time she'd ever seen the Doctor wield a weapon with deadly force; a memory she had hoped never to revisit. This man couldn't be another old enemy of the Doctor's, could he?

The stranger headed back onto the brick walkway and the Doctor followed. But Miranda, heart pounding recklessly, couldn't find the courage. Not again, not so soon. She felt the blood drain from her face.

"It's all right, Miranda, the rest of the ground is quite solid," the stranger assured her from the walkway.

Miranda couldn't even compose an answer. Her stomach was flipping wildly and she was aware that she must look completely strange, but to hell with how she looked. She had been deceived by charm and kindness once before.

The Doctor turned around to look at her. "What is it?" he asked quizzically.

Miranda could only look him in the eye, hoping his alien sentiments were close enough to a human's that he would understand what it was. Maybe he was used to walking into lion's dens, the kind of life he led, but Miranda hadn't his long experience with it, and was growing ever more certain that she didn't want to.

The Doctor came back and stared down into her face, which Miranda suspected must have looked as colorless as the drab sky. He didn't seem to be catching on.

"Wh-who is that?" she finally managed through her tight throat.

The Doctor scratched his temple self-consciously. "Ah, well, that's going to take a bit of explaining, see–"

"Indeed it will, especially once you've come inside," the stranger piped up from behind the Doctor.

The Doctor turned to him, evidently picking up a vibe lost to Miranda. "What's inside?"

"Well, the tea, for one thing. Please, just come inside and I promise everything will start making sense. Well, sort of, anyway. As much as it can, given the circumstances."

Oddly, the Doctor's heavy suspicion seemed to melt away. "You had me at 'tea.' Come on, Miranda." He patted the back of her head in that way he knew irritated her and loped back towards the house after the other man.

Miranda smoothed her hair reflexively, her panic subsiding. The Doctor wasn't acting as if they were in the company of a mortal enemy, and that was something she had seen firsthand. This guy, whoever he was, must be safe enough. She commanded her rubbery legs forward and joined the two men on the bricks. As she followed them up the wide steps to the front door, she saw the cloaked figure had returned to lurking at the corner of the house. She shot him a severe look and felt an upwelling of satisfaction when he withdrew out of sight.

The stranger held open the door and waved for the Doctor and Miranda to enter. Stepping out from behind the Doctor, Miranda's sneakers sank into lush burgundy carpeting. She immediately recognised the room as a richly furnished Victorian parlour. It reminded her of how the console room of the TARDIS had looked when she'd first come aboard, before one of the Doctor's more catastrophic redecorating fits. The mantle above the cold fireplace was even lined with clocks, filling the small room with ambient, rhythmic chatter.

Another man, this one in red-striped pants and scuffed white sneakers, sat in a chair beside the fireplace, a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on his nose, and a book open in his lap. As the door shut behind her, Miranda saw the man look up with a start and snatch the glasses off of his face. "Oh, new arrivals!" he remarked with the merest surprise. Then his face lit up with what was so far the most charming smile of the day. "Come to think of it, I thought I heard the transmat a short while ago." He jumped off the chair with surprising energy, considering his middle-aged appearance, and extended a hand towards the Doctor.

"Oh really? And who is it this time?" a slightly rusty and rather bombastic voice queried from another room. Miranda watched the Doctor's entire frame seem to stiffen at the sound.

A third gentleman entered the room and everyone else seemed to fade from existence. His portly frame was squeezed into the most elaborate dress coat Miranda had ever seen, a mishmash of bright colours with plaid lapels and a huge, blue, polka-dotted necktie; yellow striped pants and a fringe of white curls ringing his reddened scalp.

Benjamin Franklin in a clown costume, Miranda thought suddenly. She glanced at the Doctor for some kind of clue. For his part, the Doctor looked dumbstruck, his mouth frozen in a wordless "o." The clown man pulled off one scorched oven mitt and looked the Doctor over, as if sizing him up. To Miranda's surprise, he appeared dubiously unimpressed.

After the politeness and smiles of the other two, Miranda found his response strangely refreshing.

"I don't believe it," the Doctor finally spluttered.

The man with the reading glasses seemed to give up getting a handshake from the Doctor and instead directed his outstretched hand to Miranda. She reached to accept it. "Anyway, I'm the Doctor," he said.

"You're what?" she blurted, hand freezing short of his.

"Oh, it's worse yet. I am also the Doctor," the clown man added ruefully.

Miranda stared at each of the three men in turn. "I–what?" She looked at the Doctor–her Doctor–helplessly.

As if on cue, he melted into his broad smile. "Well hullo, Doctors! This is Miranda. Miranda, meet the Doctors!" he clapped her cheerfully on the back. "If I'd known there was going to be a reunion, I'd have worn a different jumper."


	6. Part Six

Scrambling to make sense out of all this, Miranda could only assume this was some kind of absurd, poorly executed prank. "So what's this place, Casino Royale?" she quipped.

"Sorry?" the reading glasses 'Doctor' queried innocently.

"Nineteen-sixties James Bond spoof?" Miranda explained. Glancing around, she couldn't believe all four of them seemed to have no idea what she was talking about. "Wrong crowd, I guess," Miranda muttered, feeling even more awkward. Recovering, she began again. "So, sorry if I've totally missed something here, but what do you mean, you're all called the Doctor?"

"Er, no, we are the Doctor," the original stranger said, sounding slightly embarrassed. "Each one of us is the Doctor. The same person." He turned to her Doctor. "You never told her about it, then?"

"Why would I? It's not really something that comes up in conversation, believe it or not," the Doctor retorted in umbrage.

"Tell me about what?" Miranda asked.

"But more importantly, what are all of you doing here? What am I doing here with all of you? This is completely wrong," the Doctor continued heedlessly. "And what's happened to all of you?" he added suddenly.

"What do you mean?" the clown one demanded.

"Tell me about what?" Miranda repeated a little more forcefully. With such a mousy voice, she was used to being ignored.

"You all look terrible!" the Doctor said plainly. The others all seem to take offence at that (and rightly so, in Miranda's opinion).

"You're one to talk!" the clown one spat. "Exactly what sort of life form is that you're wearing, anyway?"

"You're having a go at my outfit, Patches?" the Doctor sneered in disbelief.

Frustrated, Miranda shut her eyes. "TELL ME ABOUT WHAT?" she repeated quite loudly. When she opened her eyes, she saw all four men giving her their undivided attention. It was a little embarrassing, but it did the trick.

"What's the trouble?" the reading glasses man asked openly.

"How can you all be the same person?" Miranda tried very hard not to snap, quickly tiring of this run-around.

"Oh that! Quite simple. I regenerated. Again," the clown one remarked succinctly with another disapproving once-over of the Doctor.

"It's a Timelord trick," the first stranger added. "Every time my body dies, I regenerate into a new one. By the way, which regeneration are you?" the stranger eyed the Doctor curiously.

"Eighth. Not bad, eh?" the Doctor took a moment to pose on display, once more all smiles. Miranda shook her head sadly.

The stranger looked a bit worried. "All that to look forward to…" he murmured mysteriously.

"Yes, well now that we're all acquainted with one another," the reading glasses man spoke up, "I suggest we discuss our more pressing concerns before Goran–"

SNAP! CRZZZ!

Miranda yelped and jumped back as a bright light exploded where the Doctor was standing. It was gone in a flash, and she noticed, once she blinked the big white spots away, so was the Doctor.

"–activates the transmat," the reading glasses man finished lamely.

Miranda stared stunned at the empty air that had been the Doctor. First the TARDIS, now he was gone too. "What happened?"

"That was fast," the stranger remarked, completely unconcerned.

"One less for tea, then," the clown one observed simply. "Speaking of, Miranda, how do you take yours? Sugar, cream?"

This was too surreal. Miranda could only blink stupidly at him. Tea? Tea! The Doctor goes POOF right in front of them and he's asking her about tea?

"Oh, bother, I'll bring the tray, you can suit yourself, how does that sound?" His puffy face crinkled in a jolly grin. "If you'll excuse me, chaps." He started humming a little tune as he walked out of the room.

The reading glasses man picked up his book and settled back down into his chair, popping out his wire frames, seemingly without a care in the world. "Pull up a chair. There's nothing to worry about," he advised.

"Well now! Seeing as your friend won't be back for a while, what say I give you the grand tour?" the stranger exclaimed with an eager smile on his face, as naturally as if a man hadn't just disappeared in a flash of light from the middle of the room.

"What? What do you mean? What just happened?" Miranda demanded shrilly.

"Happened?" the stranger looked puzzled.

"To the Doctor!"

"Oh, that! Just Goran's transmat beam, nothing to worry about," the stranger reiterated.

"Excuse me, but how do you know?"

"Because that's what he does. We've all been through it. More than once. Not my favourite hobby, I'll admit, but at least the accommodations are–"

"Who's Goran?"

"Oh, merely the zookeeper," the man with the reading glasses remarked, not looking up from his book.

"Did his teleport take the TARDIS, too?"

"I suspect so," the stranger said.

"Why? What for? Why are you helping this guy?"

"Helping? What on Earth gives you that idea?" The stranger asked.

"D'you know I've reread this same passage over three times now?" the man with the reading glasses commented with thinly veiled annoyance.

"Why? Is it something interesting?" the stranger quipped. To Miranda he said, "There's a perfectly sensible explanation for all of this. I recommend we sit down, have a cup of tea, and–"

Enough was enough. Miranda was out the door and halfway to the front gate before she could realize that she didn't know where she was going. Anywhere but back in that psycho ward, for sure. Maybe flag down a car on that road.

"Miranda, wait!"

She whirled around, still backing towards the gate. "No!" she snarled at the longhaired stranger following her. Unfortunately, her voice lacked the depth to do much better than a screech. "I don't know what's going on here, and you guys aren't making any sense at all! Just…don't bother me!"

The stranger stopped on a dime, an injured look on his careworn, aristocratic features. "I'm sorry, it's just that we've been here quite a while and sometimes forget–"

"I don't care, just like the rest of you! We're trapped here, now the Doctor's missing, and all you want to do is drink your stupid tea! You're…strange!"

"The Doctor will be returned, you're overreacting."

"You're damn right I am!" She yanked the gate open angrily, aware that at least part of this outburst had been simmering inside her for a considerable time.

"Where will you go?" he asked.

She paused. "I don't know. Hitchhike to someplace where everybody's not insane!"

"There aren't any."

She shot him a venomous glare before staring out through the gate again. "Think you're funny?"

"That's not I meant! I meant there's nowhere else to go," he amended himself quickly. "We were all brought here against our wishes, like you, and whoever's done it has made certain there's no way out. Sorry to have to tell you, but we're trapped."

"There's a road."

"That ends here, both ways. I don't suppose you had time to notice, but there's an identical gate round the back. The road starts here, goes a few miles and dead ends back here."

"That's stupid."

"But the truth, I'm afraid," the reading glasses man chimed in. "There's a spatial limitation field in place. Walk long enough in any direction and you'll come round to where you started."

Miranda turned. The reading glasses man, hands in his pockets, stood in the place where the Doctor had encountered the tripwire. A breeze flapped his red-hemmed coattails and tousled his pale, shaggy tresses, revealing a badly receding hairline. In the watery light, neither one of them came off very well. Rather haggard and worn out, in fact. Their tired acceptance of the situation was a far more distressing symptom, however. Downright creepy. "Then I guess I'll be seeing you later," she spat, marching through the gate and throwing it closed behind her.

As she walked away from the house, she heard one say contritely to the other, "You'd think we'd be better at this by now."


	7. Part Seven

SNAP! CRZZZ!

For a moment, the Doctor's body felt squeezed so tight that he worried his head would pop. A tremendous, luminous blast blinded him at the same second and he lost all sense of orientation, until his feet were jarred by a solid surface and he fell onto his backside, head throbbing.

Transmats were generally reliable, but these crude versions were practically a form of torture. The Doctor shook off the lingering discomfort and looked around. Well, this was familiar enough–a holding cell. Impenetrable plasteel walls, tamper-proof lighting fixtures and air vents out of reach in the ceiling, too small to be of use, anyway. Especially since there were no pieces of furniture or amenities of any kind in the bland, cream-coloured space. Walking to the transparisteel door, the Doctor looked hopefully for some kind of locking mechanism, but came away disappointed. Must be remote-wired. That narrowed the timeframe to somewhere in the–well, it wasn't any primitive era, to be sure. Plasteel cell construction was frustratingly standard technology everywhere, it seemed.

Beyond the door was an equally bland, utilitarian corridor the likes of which the Doctor had encountered too many whens and wheres to keep track. He reached inside his jacket for the sonic screwdriver. Maybe he could bounce a resonance frequency off of the door that would tell him the rate of molecular decay. He honestly didn't know what good that would do him, but it was better than standing around like a lump–

Out of the corner of his eye, the Doctor spotted a shadow move in the corridor. He froze; hand half-buried in his jacket and waited expectantly. He felt a quick thrill when the shadow condensed into a bipedal form coming up the corridor. Inductive reasoning was all well and good, but it could never take the place of a good, old-fashioned Q and A. When the creator of the shadow stepped into view, the Doctor couldn't help cracking his huge grin.

To the casual eye, it looked like a lean humanoid wearing a close-fitting, armoured body suit and cowl. But as it stepped up to the cell door, the Doctor noticed that each of its steps was precisely the same size, and made with a fluid grace no organic muscle could match. When it came to a halt, it didn't even waver. Not a movement wasted or miscalculated. It appeared to eye the Doctor with disdainfully, a mean trick considering it had no face.

"Well, look at you!" the Doctor exclaimed admiringly to the android. It was one thing for it to be so functionally perfect, but whoever built this one obviously had an aesthetic sense, as well. As he studied the gleaming chrome breastplate and gauntlets and the sleek design of the helmet, he failed to recall anything quite like it.

The android placed one hand out of sight beside the door. "Stay relaxed and calm," it said in a mechanical voice that was surprisingly primitive to have come from such an advanced machine. The words themselves struck the Doctor as being a slightly strange thing to say.

"Good advice, considering I've just been kidnapped and imprisoned with no explanation. Well done. Say, you couldn't put in a word with housekeeping about getting me a different cell, could you? This one doesn't even have a cot."

"Stay relaxed and calm," the android said again.

"Hmm. Not programmed for interpersonal interaction, eh?"

FSSS!

The Doctor sobered instantly and turned around. The ceiling vents had been switched on. With his next breath, he felt an odd tingle in his chest. Anaesthesia. Feeling his chest tighten further with tendrils of panic, he whirled around and pounded on the door.

"What are you doing? Stop!" he wheezed.

"Stay calm and relaxed," the android repeated.

The Doctor could feel the potent chemical seeping into his muscles and beginning to cloud his brain. He sagged heavily to his knees. Too late to trigger his respiratory bypass. He fought to keep his mind above the rising flood of unconsciousness, but he was already beginning to drown.

"Stay calm and relaxed," he heard vaguely as the thick, velvety blackness rose to envelop his senses.

-------------------------------------

Miranda walked quickly, only slowing once she had passed the hillside where the TARDIS had landed and was certain those men could no longer see her from the gate. Then she stopped. Ahead, the road shot in a straight line as far as she could see. She glanced behind her at the house, then back to the road.

Those 'Doctors' didn't know what they were talking about. 'Spatial limitation field'? Maybe that worked on lesser minds, but Miranda knew bull crap when she heard it. She kept walking, each step bleeding a little more frustration out of her. She felt quite normal, now. That twitchy sensation was gone entirely.

Perhaps, she began to reflect, she should have kept a cooler head back there. As convoluted and strange as the situation was, no one had given the slightest indication that either she or the Doctor were in any grave danger. She probably should have drank their tea and calmly asked what was going on before deciding to completely freak out. Wasn't she usually a bit more sensible than that?

What was usual, anymore?

Bottom line, she realized, was that she was growing very tired of all these unplanned stops when things went wrong and the Doctor expected her jump in with both feet. It wasn't her strong suit, but when she took these long trips away from him it was that much harder to get back in practise. Maybe it was time to re-evaluate her priorities.

The countryside was largely flat and treeless and Miranda didn't hear any birds or insects. A cold, damp breeze gave her a chill. She was definitely regretting her outburst. And not bringing a coat. She usually kept a backpack in the console room with essentials in it–such as a sweater–that she could bring just in case, but she hadn't bothered repacking since getting back.

Up ahead, a dense fog was drifting across the road. What a rotten day. Crossing her arms, she pressed on through the cloud, feeling goose bumps arise on her exposed arms and legs. Almost immediately the fog began to condense on the lenses of her glasses. For appearing so suddenly it was surprisingly thick. If not for the road beneath her feet, she would have worried about getting lost. As it was, she slowed down and moved to the inside edge of the road. So far it had been deserted, but wouldn't it be just her luck to suddenly encounter traffic?

Sure enough, a few feet further she came nose-to-mortar with a brick structure of some kind. She must have run into a building built right on the road's edge. Miranda listened carefully, and hearing no vehicles, started across the road, tracing the wall with her fingers, feeling for its edge. She was in the middle of the road when she began to suspect that it didn't have an edge. Why would someone build a wall right across a paved road?

She had part of her answer when her fingers found a gap between cold metal bars. A gate. She pushed on it experimentally and it creaked inward. Miranda stepped inside and immediately left the fog behind. Within, she saw a pond, several large shade trees and a few sorry-looking landscaped beds, and the back end of the manor house.

"What the–?" Miranda looked back into the fog. She'd been on the edge of the road and was sure she would've noticed a sharp bend, bringing her back this way. And even so, before the fog rolled in the road was straight as far as the eye could see. "Spatial limitation field," she muttered distastefully, pulling the gate closed. "Why not?" She noticed the sky was a good deal darker than it had been before she walked into the fog. Probably going to rain.

As much as she wasn't looking forward to walking back into that house, Miranda was lost for an alternative. If those guys were right about the limitation field, maybe they were right about the Doctor coming back. At the very least she could play along with this bizarre charade long enough to find out what was going on.

She began picking her way through the yard and passed under a thick, gnarled tree, when something suddenly dropped around her neck and pulled taunt.


	8. Part Eight

"Hello? Are you awake, Doctor?"

Consciousness charged through the Doctor's body like a bolt of electricity. He jerked his limbs and realized he was restrained. Opening his eyes, he discovered he was now lying inside a clear, cylindrical tube of some sort, braces securing his ankles, wrists and chest. Peering down at him through the mildly distorting material of the tube was a wizened, furry face topped with two small horn nubs, and floating above a badly rumpled mess of a lab coat.

"I'm sorry to have drugged you earlier, but you and I both know you wouldn't have given me another choice," the creature, some kind of alien the Doctor had not seen before, commented in a halting, rusty voice as he poked at an adjacent bank of machinery.

"So that was your android? Who are you? What are you doing?" the Doctor tried to ask through vocal cords that still seemed slightly paralyzed from the anesthesia.

"My name, if it really matters," the alien sighed, "is Goran. And what I'm doing right now, sadly, is hurting you." He gazed at the Doctor with a mixture of resignation and pity. "So sorry." He flipped a switch on the panel.

Pain erupted in every nerve fiber the Doctor had. A loud buzzing filled his head and his jaw clenched so hard he worried his teeth might shatter. He couldn't breathe. It felt as though his organs were bathing in acid. Every muscle rigid in agony, the Doctor sensed his mind begin to turn inward, retreating from the physical distress. His insides twisted suddenly and he broke out in a cold sweat. Light started to well up at the back of his eyes and for the first time in a very long time, the Doctor felt a surge of real panic. He knew what was coming next. He always knew when it was coming, and he always dreaded it.

The Doctor fought to keep himself in the moment. He'd driven off the inevitable once before. He'd been considerably younger then, but his will was as strong as ever. But the pain was just so intense. Through teary eyes he saw Goran watching him with an unreadable expression, his finger gently prodding a lever, pushing it higher.

The pain was so bad that the Doctor began to wonder if it wouldn't be better to stop fighting it and let nature take its course. It would be so easy to give into the warmth and detachment welling up inside his tormented body, to slip back into oblivion and wake up a new man. So many bad memories when he looked into the mirror. Maybe this time would be easier.

_Hold on, now I'm getting delusional,_ he realized abruptly. If anything, the process got more onerous each time. And what a ridiculous way to snuff it–trapped inside a plastic bubble by some squirrelly little alien he hadn't even had a proper dialogue with! No, that wouldn't do at all. Not to mention the tedious explaining he'd owe to Miranda when he came back looking like a completely different person. No, the Doctor decided, he definitely wasn't in the mood to regenerate today.

Gathering his senses together, he forced his eyes to stay open, willing his body to stay as it was. He could feel his tissues spasming in protest, but he simply stared hard at Goran, living in the pain. Goran watched him dispassionately, and then pressed a button.

The Doctor cried out in agony as a fresh jolt of pain shattered his reserves. He desperately tried to hold on, but he could feel his body slipping out of his control and the energy beginning to build up inside him as his cells began reorganizing themselves.

But suddenly it started to go wrong.

His body felt like it caught on fire and a hazy cloud of golden vapors diffused out of skin, through his clothes and into the tube. But there it stopped. He could feel his cells straining to complete the change, to renew themselves, but something outside his will was holding him back.

Then the pain was gone, leaving a stinging exhaustion in its wake. The tube began to rumble and the gold vapors were sucked out. The Doctor watched in helpless horror as Goran shuffled off behind the tube, then reemerged holding a sealed cylinder that glowed with hazy gold light. Goran appeared to study it minutely, then walked over to an adjacent bank of machinery and slid open a metal cabinet. He set the cylinder on end beside several others, all glowing in different hues, then slid the cabinet closed.

Goran stood there, his back to the Doctor, one hand on the cabinet handle, and didn't move for a long moment. The Doctor saw his stooped, rounded shoulders rise and fall emphatically, as if the small alien were sighing heavily or shuddering.

Then his hand dropped from the door and he turned to face the Doctor's tube. "Well, that wasn't so bad, was it?" the alien remarked.

-------------------------------------------

Miranda grabbed the thing around her throat and yanked in a slight panic. It came off in her hands so she threw it as far as she could. She straightened in time to see the mysterious, hat-wearing weirdo from earlier drop from the branches with an undignified WHUMP! Draped around his shoulders and trailing off to where Miranda had thrown the other end was a ridiculously long woollen scarf. He appeared momentarily stunned by his fall.

Suspicion momentarily taking a back seat to concern, Miranda leaned towards him. He lay flat on his back, hat popping off his head, letting loose a wild array of white curls.

"Hey, are you alright?" she asked.

The man blinked and sat up suddenly, a hand protecting his hat. He looked up at Miranda with a bemused expression contorting his bird-like features. He was an emaciated-looking figure buried inside his heavy overcoat and baggy trousers, his cheeks and chin drooping with age.

"Oh," he said in a remarkably deep timbre. "Oh dear. I seem to have made a grave error in judgement. You look nothing like Davros at all!" He glanced around the yard in slack-jawed confusion. "You haven't seen him, by any chance? He'd be rather hard to miss, I should think, as there aren't all that many psychotic megalomaniacs who travel by dodge-em car."

"I'm guessing that's a 'no,'" Miranda muttered to herself.

"Hmm? Oh, that's too bad, you see it's terribly important that I find Davros. You might even say the universe depends on it."

"The universe?" Miranda repeated dubiously.

The man stood up, brushing himself off and winding up his scarf. "Well I suppose not, but he does owe me a tenner, shifty blighter."

"Who?"

The man held up a silencing finger and turned away from her, holding his hat on his head. "Hmm? No, no Rassilon, I couldn't possibly fit you in," he paused, "Oh, I'd say at least a fortnight." He paused again, looked up at the tree and took a measured step away from it, adjusting his hat. "I said maybe in a fortnight. Yes, half-past will do nicely." He took off his hat and made a few (imaginary?) adjustments to it, looking at her grumpily. "I do wish these old fools would stop bothering me with their trifles. I'm President! Don't they realize I'm busy?"

Miranda made no effort to hide her confusion.

He plunked the hat back on his head and stared at her as if only seeing her for the first time. "Oh! How do you do, my dear? I'm the Doctor. Yes I know, shocking, isn't it? I didn't used to be a duck, of course, but that's regeneration for you. Still, I do like the feathers." He fished around in his pockets and produced a crumpled brown paper bag. "Would you like a jelly baby?"

Miranda eyed the proffered bag suspiciously. Not quite all together, this one. But not wanting to appear rude and possibly upset him, she reached into the bag and pulled out a pebble. From the feel of it, the bag was full of pebbles.

"Uh, thank you," she said, discreetly pocketing the small stone.

"I'm rather fond of the green ones myself. Good for clogging the breathing apparatus of Cybermen," he continued conversationally.

"Cybermen?" Miranda repeated incredulously.

"Oh yes, do be careful. Only today I buried one in an avalanche and lured a second to its death in a ditch."

"Maybe somebody should call a cyber-exterminator," Miranda suggested, playing along.

"Not much point, seeing as I'm already here," he said.

"Several times over," Miranda added, watching his response.

"Yes, so they would have you believe. But rest assured, my dear, there is only one Doctor, and it's me. But we're losing valuable daylight. Come with me, you can help me with something," he switched tasks instantly and hurried towards a badly overgrown hedgerow in the nearest corner of the yard.

Miranda followed him out of sheer curiosity. He seemed harmless enough. Approaching the hedge, she saw that a rectangular piece of sod had been dug out of the ground.

The man picked up a rusty spade shovel lying in the grass and held it out to her. "Are you any good at digging?"

"Why? What is it?"

"Oh, an addition, is all," the man sighed distractedly, squinting into the dingy twilight.

"May I ask, what to?" Miranda pressed wearily. So little about today was making any sense!

"What to? What to?!" he repeated indignantly, "This!" He reached into the hedge and pulled several boughs aside.

Miranda cautiously stepped forward and looked into the gap. Crosses. Broad, flat, wooden crosses. Four of them, in a neat row. Miranda gazed at the man suspiciously, hoping they weren't what they appeared to be. She leaned forward and looked harder and saw, to her dismay, that there was a name burned into the crossbeam of each small crucifix:

Leela. Turlough. Tegan Jovanka. Melanie Bush.

Growing sick with dread, Miranda turned to him in horror. "Are those–are those…graves?" She didn't need him to answer. The truth was distressingly obvious. "Who–who were they? And–" she stared at the shovel in his hands and the partially dug grave at this feet "–whose is this?"

His response turned Miranda's blood to ice. "This? Well, yours, my dear."


	9. Part Nine

The Doctor could feel his organs and tissues settling uncomfortably into their proper arrangement. It was a sickening sensation, and the Doctor was eager to take his mind off it. "What did you do that for?" he asked.

"None of your concern at the moment," Goran dithered, turning back to his bank of monitors and buttons.

"Why did you collect my essence?" the Doctor pressed. Goran pressed a few buttons and squinted at a monitor screen, deliberately ignoring him. The Doctor's insides writhed a bit more and he broke out in a nauseous, cold sweat. "Those other containers—they've all got my essence in them, haven't they? You're taking it from all my selves. What's it for?" the Doctor wondered aloud. "And where are we?"

Goran shot him a furtive, unsettled glance, but said nothing.

"Now see, you've got this all backward. As the prisoner, I'm the one that's supposed to be refusing to talk. You, on the other hand, should be laughing maniacally and gloating—in explicit detail—about how cleverly evil and unstoppable your plan is," the Doctor prattled glibly to take his mind off his discomfort. "If you're going to do the part, you should at least get it right."

"Hm, I guess that's a change," Goran muttered.

"What is?"

"Your automatic assumption that I'm scheming up something evil. I didn't even get a platonic 'hello, I'm the Doctor,' like your others started with. I'm not completely sure cynicism suits you." Goran stopped poking at buttons and eyed the Doctor nearsightedly. "Unless you're just remembering me from those previous encounters?"

"Afraid it doesn't work like that."

"Oh, right. Yes. So you've told me…" Goran did a quick count-off on his fingers, "…four times now, I guess. Perhaps I should start believing you. Although it's still possible you just consulted with your others and got your story straight before I brought you here. I keep telling my supervisors that you should be transmatted directly here so you don't have the chance to scheme beforehand, but they don't seem to think it's a problem. Not like you could slip anything past them anyway, I guess."

"Supervisors?" the Doctor repeated, latching onto the scant piece of intelligence. "Who are they?" he asked. His faculties still felt slightly dulled; he hadn't quite got the hang of this temporal dimension yet.

"Individuals concerned with keeping their privacy, I guess you might say. Now hold still, please." Goran pressed a button and the interior of the Doctor's tube lit up with red light.

The Doctor winced, prepared for the worst, but all he felt was a light, prickly sensation on his exposed skin. The light turned off, and the prickly feeling went away. A spectral, full-body scan, apparently. "I'd just like to know what they want my essence for, not their credit card numbers or anything. Why can't you tell me that?" the Doctor asked.

"You know exactly why not," Goran harrumphed.

"If it's regeneration they're interested in, fair enough, but why collect so many of me? With this machine you've got, all you'd need is…"

"Give it a rest, Doctor, I can't tell you any of the things you really want to know, and you'll only exhaust yourself trying to fill in the blanks yourself. I'm as much a prisoner as you are, you know."

"So you've been kidnapped and tortured within an inch of your life as well? How did you like it?"

"Doctor—"

"Come on, let's compare notes! Or are you afraid of a little constructive criticism?"

"No! Look, we can trade quips all day, but it's not going to get you out of here any quicker, I guarantee." Goran—amazingly—kept his cool and pressed another button, releasing the Doctor's restraints.

The Doctor grinned knowingly and reached into his jacket pocket. "Who needs quips when you've got a—" he stopped short when he came up empty-handed.

"Got a what? A sonic screwdriver, maybe?" Goran finished for him, pulling the device out of the breast pocket of his lab coat and twirling it for the Doctor to see. "Yes, this would come in handy about now, wouldn't it?" He put the screwdriver back in his front pocket and picked up a clipboard from a supply cart. "I know about all your various little accessories. Speaking of, who'd you come with this time?"

"I don't understand," the Doctor lied quickly.

"Your little human assistants or girlfriends or whatever. I confess I'm a little confused about the nature of your relationship with them. But anyway, who are you with this time?"

"Nobody really worth mentioning," the Doctor answered indifferently. "You know humans, once you've seen one, you've—"

"Female? Young, old?" Goran's patience seemed to be straining a little.

The Doctor shrugged evasively. "I don't really pay attention to those kinds of details anymore. Too confusing at my age. After nine hundred years my memory's rubbish. I tried coming up with mnemonic devices, but it's like when you tie a string round your finger to remind you of something, but then forget what the string meant." Goran looked about to interrupt him again, so the Doctor cut to the chase: "Why do you want to know, anyway? I'm the real prize; humans don't regenerate."

Goran's face twitched in a way that could have meant pain, distaste or have simply been a tic. "Neither have you, if you noticed," the little alien commented, scribbling intently.

Anything to avoid eye contact, the Doctor noticed. "I don't regenerate just because somebody wants me to. Most of the time, I don't even want me to, but you can see how well I listen to me about that!" Suddenly the sludge that had been coating the Doctor's brain started to clear a bit and he quickly recalled what had just happened to him.

Goran had a point, he realized. In the end, he hadn't been able to hold himself back. He'd started to change, but something had interfered. And it wasn't the anaesthetic. This had been a completely different sensation; the process seemed to suddenly decelerate and then stop, idle. And it was only then that Goran had cut the power, so his machine wasn't to blame.

The Doctor was growing slightly annoyed at his mind's sluggish behaviour. Goran chanced a cursory glance at the Doctor, and then resumed his note taking, waiting for the Doctor to figure it out. Rather impolite of him, the Doctor thought, since Goran had to know that he wasn't firing on all cylinders yet.

"I can't regenerate here, can I?" the Doctor concluded, "We're outside the fourth dimension, on some higher temporal plane. That's why it all feels so wrong. I'm cut off from my natural time stream, stuck the way I am," the Doctor realized. "That's why you need my other selves. You built this machine to take me to the brink of death, cause me to regenerate, but I can't." The Doctor began to grow excited as he saw the pieces fall into place. "So instead you've rigged the time corridor to bring in all my other bodies so you can work out the mechanisms by studying each individual version of me. Actually, that makes sense, come to think. When you don't have a calculator, you do the problem longhand, don't you?" The Doctor paused his musing long enough to address Goran directly, "Ingenious solution, well done. Still doesn't address the 'why' of it, though. Why me, and who are you working for?"


	10. Part Ten

Miranda's stomach hit her shoes. She stepped back from the hedge and partially dug grave, her eyes fixed on the weirdo's shovel. She wanted to check if there was anything lying around that she could use as a weapon if this lunatic suddenly decided to finish the job, but she didn't want to risk looking away from him and giving him an opening. So she just stood there and quietly began to sweat. "What do you mean, it's mine?" she asked warily.

"You're really not all that bright, are you?" the weirdo commented.

Before Miranda could figure out how to respond, a boisterous voice cut across the yard: "Ah! Here you are! I was starting to think you'd been picked up alrea—oh, no! Not again!" The pudgy man in the multicoloured jacket came strolling in from Miranda's peripheral vision and stopped between her and the weirdo, staring at the weirdo's handiwork with hands on his hips. "Haven't you got anything better to do? And where did you find a shovel?" he groused at the weirdo, highly agitated.

The weirdo drew himself up defensively. "She would have found out eventually."

"Excuse me, why is there a cemetery in your backyard?" Miranda tried to interject.

"Did you lose your manners along with your senses? That's hardly an excuse for scaring her to death! She's our guest!" the colourful jacket exclaimed and kicked at the disturbed grass. "And you've damaged the grounds again. Now those bloody androids will be all over the yard--!"

"How dare you speak that way to the Lord High President of Gallifrey!" the weirdo bellowed, gripping his shovel as if it were a regal sceptre.

"He was going to kill me!" Miranda directed her complaint at the colourful jacket, hoping to get his attention.

"Kill you? That's not like me at all. I was simply going to bury you," the weirdo said innocently.

Miranda stared at him in wordless, confused shock. She turned to the colourful jacket, hoping for some kind of explanation.

"You're not going to do anything except fill that hole back in before the damage alarm sounds off," the colourful jacket pronounced, wagging a finger at the weirdo. He put an arm around Miranda and started leading her back towards the manor. "Let's go in before it gets dark and I'll make a fresh pot of tea."

Miranda collected herself and planted her feet. Why did everyone think they could keep pacifying her so easily? "A simple question first: why are there dead people buried in the backyard?"

The colourful jacket stopped, looking somewhat surprised. "What? There's no one buried back here! Those are memorials."

Miranda blinked, processing. "But that guy--?"

"Sorry about him, he always acts up when newcomers arrive," the weirdo waved dismissively. "He's a bit of a nutter by now, I'm afraid."

"'Eccentric,' if you please," the weirdo chimed in behind Miranda.

"You've been a few Jelly Babies short of eccentric since before I got here," the colourful one derided.

"Really? I must remember to requisition another bag from the Castellan the next time I see him. Though they do get caught in my feathers something awful, naughty little sweets."

"You do that."

"So no one's died?" Miranda asked before the conversation could wander off again.

"Yes," the weirdo said. "No," the colourful one said at the same time.

"Yes and no," the weirdo added.

Miranda covered her face with a hand, exasperated almost beyond caring by this point. "Which is it?" she snapped.

"Sad to say, none of us knows definitively. The last time any of them were here with us, they were certainly alive; then one by one, Goran took them," the colourful one explained regretfully. "What became of them after that…" he shrugged with a distressing degree of hopelessness. He glanced at Miranda and smiled sadly. "I trust they're alright somewhere. Still, I suppose almost anything is better than sitting around here with nothing to do but wither away."

------------------------------------------

The black android walked into sight and Goran gave the clipboard to it. The android took it, walked across the room and sat down at a computer and began typing.

"That's one of things I admire about you, Doctor. If I let you talk long enough, you eventually find the answers to your questions on your own. Wish I could do that. By the way, which regeneration are you?"

The Doctor took a moment to regroup. A tougher nut to crack than he'd expected, this Goran. "Well, I'll tell you something—"

Suddenly something began beeping. Goran jumped, a hand flying to his chest. "Oh!" He recovered himself and flew to a bank of monitors. The Doctor heard him bluster a huge sigh. "You again!" he said to the screen.

"What is it?" the Doctor asked.

"Nothing, nothing, just a damage alarm."

"Damage alarm?"

Goran shook his fuzzy head quickly. "Four's up to his old tricks again. Joy. You know my fur was green when I first came here?" he revealed, suddenly contemplative. "Each one of these grey hairs is as much your fault as anything else. I wish you'd just accept the fact that there's no escape and put up with this purgatory we've been dumped in."

The Doctor pulled his brows together, confused.

Goran appeared to shiver, then turned back to the Doctor. "I guess we might as well stop here for now anyway." Goran walked over to a bank of machinery next to the Doctor's tube and flipped a switch. The air vent inside the tube rumbled to life. He tabbed another control and the beeping of the damage alarm silenced.

The Doctor had a good idea what was coming and engaged his respiratory bypass. "Pity, I was just starting to get settled in."

"Don't worry about that, you'll have plenty of time to get used to how things work around here," Goran answered.

The Doctor was disturbed to feel a familiar tingling sensation in his throat and limbs. How was that possible? He shook himself, but already his mind was drifting away in a fog and his body was starting to go leaden. "How--?" he slurred quizzically.

Goran eyed him a moment and then chuckled. "I guess you're not so changed after all! Maybe I should have warned you; the anaesthesia is absorbed directly through your skin, so your respiratory bypass won't do anything. Sweet dreams, Doctor."


	11. Part Eleven

Miranda heard the weirdo's shovel drop and she glanced over her shoulder to see him speaking to his hat again: "In fact, I did you a considerable favour, Brigadier. It was only because I'm the president that you were even allowed into the Matrix, so I would be a bit more appreciative…Nothing to do?! You should have thought of that before sacrificing yourself to the Skarasen…No, I didn't! What? Ahh, well, not even I get it right all the time, Brigadier…"

"How long have you been here?" Miranda turned and asked the colourful one.

"That's really the question, isn't it? You must have noticed by now that time moves differently here. I've known minutes to feel like hours and days to pass almost without a moment's notice. Bedevils my culinary efforts."

"I did experience a strange, slow-motion effect when the Doctor and I first arrived, but everything seems normal now."

"Is it? Check your timepiece," Colours suggested with an arched eyebrow.

Miranda looked at her watch and to her surprise saw the hands spinning wildly. She shook her wrist and the hands seemed to freeze for a split second, but then merely began moving backwards. "How come I don't feel that?"

"Because you're human," the Doctor cut in.

Miranda looked up and felt a huge weight slide off her shoulders as he strolled over to join them. She'd been so occupied that she must have missed the sound of the transmat. "You're alive!" she exclaimed stupidly.

"Humans aren't as sensitive to time as—obviously—a Timelord is. It's wired into the very fabric of our being, makes us more aware of everything," the Doctor continued, apparently in high spirits as he clapped Miranda on the back. "I'm fine, by the way."

"Oh! Of course, glad to hear it," Miranda sighed with relief. The Doctor's grin suddenly grew vacant and he unceremoniously began to slump to the ground. "Whoops!" Miranda grabbed him, but he was a lot of dead weight. Colours grabbed one of his arms and helped her pull him back up.

"Careful now, Doctor!" Colours grunted as he and Miranda sat him on the ground.

"Oof! Make that mostly fine," the Doctor winced, coming around.

"What happened?" Miranda asked, crouching next to him and glancing him over. His eyes looked fine and he had no obvious injuries that she could see. The panicky thought that he might end up incapacitated, leaving her alone to handle the situation, faded quickly, but she was surprised at how strong it had been.

The Doctor rubbed his temples and grimaced. "I met Goran."

"What did he—?"

SNAP! CRZZZ!

"Ow!" Miranda yelped as the transmat went off directly behind her, blasting her eardrums. She looked and saw a cloud of dissipating ozone where the weirdo had been standing with his shovel.

SNAP! CRZZZ!

Now blind as well as deaf, Miranda blinked away the spots and saw two black and silver humanoids appear out of the ozone cloud next to the disturbed hedgerow. She scrambled around the Doctor, putting some more space (and him) between her and the humanoids, just in case the transmat decided to go off again. They began poking around, picking up the pieces of turf that had been dug out.

"Right! Inside!" Colours announced.

Miranda couldn't suppress a sudden, amused chuckle. "Who called up the Power Rangers?"

"They're androids," the Doctor said. "So there's more than one?" he asked Colours.

"Substantially more, but it only takes one to put paid any ideas about interfering with them."

"Interfere? You mean something like this?" The Doctor stepped up behind the androids and tapped one on its chrome shoulder. "'Allo, mate—"

As soon as the Doctor's hand touched the android, it turned on him and landed an open palm against his chest with considerable force. The Doctor ended up sprawled at Miranda's feet, looking equally surprised and pained. "Please vacate the area," the android droned dispassionately, turning back to its partner.

"Wow," Miranda couldn't help muttering as she offered the Doctor a hand getting up.

"Superbly demonstrated, Doctor, however needlessly," sighed Colours.

"How is saying hello interfering? Just rude, you ask me," the Doctor grumbled. "Okay, so don't mess with the androids. Got it. How else have you tried escaping, Patches?"

Miranda took a liberal step back when one of the androids moved near her. "What say we move the chat indoors, Doctor?"

"Good thinking!" Colours effused.

"Not a bad idea," the Doctor agreed.

-------------------------------------------------

Once back in the parlour, the door closed behind them, the Doctor felt a slight cosmic twinge and was startled to notice that it now appeared to be completely dark outside. Reflexively he checked his watch, but it was spinning pointlessly. Funny that he hadn't thought to look at it before. Glancing up, he saw the array of clocks on the mantle was doing largely the same thing, but they were all out of sync with each other.

He could sense the tiny rivulets of time drifting through space, wrenching the clocks, tugging at his body, spurring apotheosis and cell division in fits and starts and distorting motion in front of his eyes. He still felt depleted from Goran's ministrations, and the combined effect was fast growing extremely irritating. He looked over at Miranda, who was looking out the curtains, evidently noticing the sudden time change as well. She seemed perfectly acclimated. He felt a little envious of her for that.

"Ha! Check!"

The Doctor recognized the voice of his previous regeneration and noticed that he and his fifth incarnation were seated on opposite sides of a chessboard. A gramophone (not a Victrola) was playing _Mi tradi quell'alma ingrata_, Elvira's aria, from Mozart's _Don Giovanni._

Cavalieri still sang it best, the Doctor opined to himself.

"Check? Impossible!" his fifth protested shrilly, popping on his spectacles and eyeing the chessboard in that nearsighted way the Doctor had hoped would make his preternaturally young face look more authoritative. Considering how aged he now appeared, it actually seemed natural.

"You have to watch for that _zwischenzug_," his eighth responded smugly.

"…Yes…" his fifth agreed disgustedly, hand suspended over the pieces.

"I'll put the kettle on," the Doctor's sixth self announced, walking on out of the room.

"So, who are these guys again?" Miranda asked him quietly.

The Doctor couldn't help startling just a bit. It was easy to forget how quiet she could be. "In a word, me." He watched her brow furrow thoughtfully.

"From the past?"

"Yup." He had to admit it was fun seeing the cogs grind away between her ears.

"As in, like, reincarnation?"

"Sort of, yeah." He watched her cross her arms and purse her lips thoughtfully. "You don't believe me," he concluded without surprise.

Miranda bit her lip, several emotions passing across her face before she answered. When she did, he could barely hear her: "So that's what John was talking about."

Her hazel eyes met his for just one, self-conscious second, but he found himself unable to match her gaze as the unwelcome memory boiled up from a corner of his mind:

_"It's really a shame, Doctor, because I've got nothing against Miranda. Quite like her, in fact, yet now I'm going to have to kill her, all because of you."_

"_The only one to blame for your situation is you. Let her go."_

"_That's not how I remember it, although perhaps my memory isn't as complete as it should be, given this less-than-superior shell. A situation I hope to remedy, provided you give me what I need." _

The Doctor remembered what it felt like, holding that gun, pointing it at Miranda, but aiming it at the ruthless killer standing behind her, wondering if he really had it in him to fire.

"_I can't help you. But if you don't let her go, I swear I will hurt you." _

"Are you going to move, or what?" the Doctor's eighth self demanded crossly, snapping the Doctor out of his brief reverie.

"I'm thinking," the fifth snapped, clearly stalling, hand still poised motionless over the board.

"What of? I'll have you checkmated my next move. You're only delaying the inevitable."

"I'm not sure of that!" the fifth squeaked.

"Well I'm your future, and I'm telling you, you've lost this one."

The Doctor's fifth self yanked off his spectacles and eyed the eighth in supreme annoyance.

"I used to play tic-tac-toe with myself," Miranda piped up suddenly. The Doctor looked at her. She appeared to be eyeing the chessboard critically, but then shot him a wry smirk. "It always ended up a tie game, though."

"You had a lonely childhood, didn't you?" the Doctor felt fit to jibe, "The other kids wouldn't play with you at recess?"

"Hot tea, coming through!" the Doctor's sixth persona strolled back into the parlour, bearing a loaded tray.

"Ah! Just the thing!" his fifth exclaimed, hopping up from his seat—without making a play—to get a teacup. His eighth sat back and flung his hands up in vexation.

"So, Miranda, how is it you take your tea?" the sixth asked.

"I don't really drink tea," she answered quickly, sliding into an armchair.

"Sugar, milk?"

"I don't need anything, thanks."

The Doctor glanced at his sixth self, who shot him a meaningful look. The Doctor smiled and shrugged. "She's a bit shy in crowds. Two sugars for me." His sixth self served him a teacup and the Doctor settled himself into an armchair opposite Miranda. He took a deep breath of the steam, feeling the free radicals and oxides permeate the membranes of his nose and begin easing his achiness. "So!" he stated emphatically, "This is it, eh? Tea, chess, and the occasional torture session with Goran? Doesn't it get boring?"


	12. Part Twelve

"One finds ways of occupying one's time," his sixth remarked airily, pulling out a kerchief to dust a few crumbs off the tea tray. He shot a glance at the fifth and eighth. "Some more constructively than others."

"Still thinking?" the eighth asked the fifth, resting his chin in his palm.

"Just a minute!" the fifth complained sharply, guarding his pieces.

"Oh, for the—!" the Doctor set down his mug, leaped out of his chair and walked over to the chessboard. He looked it over minutely, then grabbed his fifth persona's rook and moved it accordingly. "There! Now can we forget the stupid chess for a mo'? I'm trying to work out an escape plan, if you don't mind."

His fifth eyed the new arrangement of pieces on the board with glee. "Of course!"

The Doctor's eighth did likewise and calmly reached for his black bishop. Suddenly the Doctor realised that he'd made a bad move. He watched his eighth swap the bishop for the fifth's king. "And checkmate. Thank you, Doctor." The eighth grinned maniacally at the fifth. "I suggest you stick to cricket."

The Doctor's fifth shook his head. "I used to be much better at this game. I—"

The Doctor's own patience was very near the end. "Oy! Am I invisible? I just said the words 'escape plan,' and nobody seemed to care."

"It's nothing personal," his fifth remarked, resetting the chessboard, "but you must understand that by now it's not a very novel phrase round here. More likely to get you into trouble." He looked up at the Doctor and cocked an eyebrow somewhat oddly. "We could while away whatever it is that constitutes the hours in this place telling you of all our failed escapes, but that would be so depressing," he smiled boyishly, with another weird quirk of his brows.

"And we've already got depressing in spades," the Doctor's eighth added. The Doctor paid him a cursory glance and was startled to see this other incarnation also briefly manipulate his brows in a strange way. The Doctor stared at him a moment, perplexed. "Obviously," his eighth said awkwardly, repeating the bizarre facial tic.

The Doctor turned his gaze to his sixth version. "I suppose you're with them?" he asked.

"Oh, definitely," the sixth agreed with a nod. Then he too furrowed his brows absurdly.

The Doctor stalked to the nearest window, baffled and angry. He was having a very difficult time wrapping his mind around this. What could have happened to render his prior selves so docile? Even in his mildest forms he could never remembering being this indolent. No wonder Miranda couldn't accept them for who they were. He almost couldn't, either. It was inexplicably odd. Though not quite as odd as their twitchy foreheads.

Must be a side effect of Goran's experiments, the Doctor reasoned. He whirled around to face his pasts. "What's happened to all of you? There's a _universe_ out there, remember?"

"And no way to reach it!" the sixth barked in obvious ill temper. "Believe me, our time has been well occupied in the effort! Between the spatial limitation field, the constant surveillance and our own diminished states our options are painfully few."

"Spatial limitation field?" the Doctor repeated, the glimmerings of a plan beginning to take shape in his brain. He looked back at Miranda, seated in her armchair, knees tucked up under her chin. She met his gaze firmly and nodded. "Right! Then we'll come up with something new," he announced.

"Oh, brilliant," the eighth version derided. The Doctor merely glared at him, then turned his attention to the whole room.

"Well, this time it'll work."

"What gives you that idea?" the fifth queried.

"Because right now you all have something you didn't have before. Coming, Miranda?"

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her uncurl herself from her chair and stretch. "Lead on, Doc," she yawned gamely.

"And what's that?" the sixth jabbed.

The Doctor flashed his bright, cheeky grin. "Me."

---------------------------------------------

Miranda let the Doctor usher her out into the front yard, where she remembered that it was now nighttime. At least the porch light was on, casting sickly orange beams across the murky blackness, but Miranda still couldn't see very much. "Er, Doc...?"

"All right, here it is: I'll start out here, you start round back, and we'll meet in the middle," the Doctor said quickly, obviously carried away with excitement.

"And what are we doing?" she asked calmly.

"Looking for a nexus point," the Doctor said, patting himself down quickly.

"You're gonna have to give me a little more."

"While I was getting tortured, it occurred to me that the technology Goran's using isn't all that refined. It's superior, don't get me wrong, but it's not top-of-the-line tech by any stretch. Tight budget, maybe. So I'll reckon the limitation field is probably the same way, meaning that the nexus point, where one end of the field connects to the other, most likely doesn't have any containment. Meaning," he barrelled on, evidently anticipating her next query, "It should be leaking all kinds of energy, and someone who's really clever should be able to find it, breech it, and escape."

"Really clever, who also has a sonic screwdriver?" Miranda asked sarcastically. Now that she had a better idea of what was going on, it was easier to step back into the little "sidekick" routine she had with the Doctor.

"I don't need the sonic screwdriver. I'm just as brilliant by myself," he protested as he walked—empty handed, she noticed—towards the front gate.

"But it's dark! What am I supposed to be looking for?" she called after him. It was also very chilly.

"Energy. Energy's mostly light and heat, and right now it's dark and cold, so it should be pretty obvious when we find it, dontcha think? Now, are you going to help me, or you going to stand there and look stupid?"

In other words, Miranda translated, he didn't know exactly what they were looking for, either, but she was too tired to be bothered about it and sick of asking to have things explained. "Out back, you said?" Well, she reasoned tiredly, what harm could it do to roam around pointlessly for a while on an inescapable estate in the middle of the night?

"Out back," the Doctor confirmed, trotting out towards the gate. "And mind the androids."

Miranda nodded and rounded the corner of the manor house. The back porch light was on as well (a nice courtesy, considering how otherwise unhelpful the other men were being), allowing Miranda to notice that the androids seemed to have gone. She saw the vague sparkles of the pond surface, but all else seemed quiet. She was sorely tempted to believe that it was as safe as it appeared to be. She'd been on edge all day and it was really starting to wear her down.

"Well, no point in standing here looking stupid, right?" she muttered to herself. Rubbing some warmth back into her arms, she headed for the back wall. Unfortunately, it was far enough from the back porch that the anaemic orange light wasn't enough to make anything really visible, so she resorted to the same method that had allowed her to find it in the first place: walking along the wall, feeling for the bars with her fingers.

WHUMP!

Miranda nearly jumped the wall in fright when she heard something land behind her. She spun around, fists up.

"First rule of escape, my dear," a familiar bass voice remarked, "Never try it 'til your captors think they've got you safe."

It was the weirdo, back and apparently none the worse for wear. He reached into his pocket, pulled out what sounded like his paper bag, and tossed it towards Miranda. She caught it and immediately realized it was no longer full of pebbles. She reluctantly reached inside it and pulled out a single, flat object. She brought it near her face for scrutiny, and suddenly it began to glow bright red and started to blink. "What is this?" she asked.

"Goodbye," the weirdo said.

The object sent an electric charge up Miranda's arm and through her body. She couldn't even cry out, because an instant later her body felt like it was being crushed on every side, and then all of her senses went dark. She felt like she was spinning a thousand miles an hour when the pressure let up and light exploded through her eyelids. For an exhilarating and disorienting moment she seemed to be in freefall. Reality finally hit her with the force of a solid, cold floor against her chest and a vise gripping her head. She stayed perfectly still and waited for the agony to subside. The Doctor was right; this transmat wasn't nearly as sophisticated as others she'd been through. Same basic head scrambling and stomach-twisting side effect, only a million times worse.

Over the buzzing in her ears, she heard what sounded like a sliding door being opened, and presently a trembling pair of hands touched her shoulders, endeavouring to pull her upright. Keeping her eyes squeezed shut to block as much of the painful illumination as possible, she complied and sat up, leaning against whoever it was for balance. The change in degree perturbed her stomach acid for a second, but she managed to keep everything down, except for an unseemly belch that caught her by surprise.

"Oops, sorry," she croaked. "I don't like transmats."

"No one does. Open your eyes and don't waste any more time," a raspy, nervous voice answered. Miranda tried, but seeing everything through her glasses only made her head hurt worse. She took them off and was then able to manage a squint. A grey, fuzzy blob crouched beside her, and there was a pile of black somethings on the floor with some shiny bits in. The fuzzy blob unceremoniously let her go, shuffled over to the pile and began shoving it towards her frantically. "Quickly, get changed!"

"Why? What?" she slurred. She realized she was still holding the small flat thing that had been blinking. It looked deceptively plain and black, now. "What was this?" she asked.

"A transmat call device coded with your Doctor's bio-signature. All the androids have them built in so they can come and go as they please."

"But it's a transmat. Why—?"

The grey creature snatched it from her fingers. "It's programmed specifically to lock onto the Doctor and no one else, so he can't avoid it like he used to when the first of him got here. Then all I have to do is tell the system which one of them I want, and ZAP!, here he comes. Once I get to do my little scan, I can program the transmat with a more specific imprint. This one was tuned to your companion."

"So you…tricked the transmat?" Miranda supposed.

"It was the only way to bring you here unnoticed. A direct override of the bio-sig passkey would have triggered an alert and locked out the system. Only Doctors allowed in the transmat. Now please get dressed!"

Her head clearing, Miranda began to examine the pile of stuff. It felt disturbingly like pieces of a rubber and spandex bodysuit. Very heavy, though. She picked up a dazzling chrome breastplate. "What am I supp—?" She stopped suddenly and put her glasses back on, a terrible realisation dawning. "Are you…Goran?"

"Yes! Now would you stop stalling and put that on?" he hissed angrily.

An icy hand wrapped itself around Miranda's heart. She recalled the memorial plots. "What did you do to them?' she demanded, tensing herself in fear.

"To whom?"

"The other humans. Leela, Melanie…" –Predictably, Miranda's memory for names failed her— "Er, and the others? What are you going to do to me?" She was surprised to see a pained shadow fly across the rodent-like little alien's face.

"I'm doing for you what I wasn't able to do for them. I'm getting you out of here, hopefully alive."


	13. Part Thirteen

**Author's Notes: **Okay! New material at long last! I changed the format to allow me to update it quicker, and hopefully make it less a chore to read. Let me know how it works! No more huuuge changes like this, I promise! (Did I mention how much I could use a good beta?)

**Note: **The version at 'Teaspoon and an Open Mind' (under PencilGuardian) is still in three big, un-updated chunks until I know which format is better, so please leave me a note!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Miranda stared at the little alien in horror. He was an incongruous thing: fuzzy and stooped and trembling, not the usual image of a killer.

But then, neither had been John, she reminded herself sickly. The Doctor had been suspicious of the inquisitive maths professor from the outset. Only brought let him on the TARDIS because she insisted (what a stupid ape she was!). It wasn't until that fateful day in the console room when Miranda had finally been able to see past John's studious human demeanour to the hostile, vengeful being that resided within him.

Her blindness nearly got her killed, and had forced the Doctor to take the worst sort of action. No wonder he hadn't objected when she told him she wanted to take some time away.

Goran worked his paws nervously. "Please trust me, little human, I'm trying to help you. That's an android skin casing; it'll mask your human bio sign. I can't dally around here; my bosses will notice if I'm gone too long from the lab. Put it on and do exactly what I tell you! This is your only chance to escape." He stepped backwards, fidgeting impatiently.

Miranda's stomach did a little flip at the word "escape." She studied the nervous little scientist. He seemed genuinely afraid of something and utterly guileless. Miranda wanted to be suspicious, but the tantalizing prospect of getting out was too tempting to put aside. She decided to trust him.

She picked up the heavy, rubbery body suit as best she could. It felt very leaden. Even if she could get it on, she wondered how she would possibly move around in it. "You mean you dismantled one of the androids?" she asked, trying to work it all out.

"Uh no, Kamelion did that. Well, snitched it, actually. Hurry up!"

"Who's Kamelion?" Miranda asked.

"Stop wasting time and you'll find out! There's a seam up the back that's self-sealing once it's on."

Miranda grabbed the sides of the suit and pulled and saw a split open up, revealing a mass of circuitry embedded on the inside. She stuck an arm into the appropriate hole and tugged until her fingers wriggled into the glove end. It was a snug, airless fit. She struggled to get her other arm in and fitted her torso. She kicked off her shoes as Goran once more began a hasty retreat from the cell.

"One thing," Miranda stopped him, "Why are you helping me? I notice you aren't doing this for the Doctor."

The careworn little alien scratched his chin fretfully. "Because my bosses need him. Them. Whatever. Not his pets. You'd all be long dead if it were up to them, but I…" Goran's twitchy little body stilled and he met Miranda's eyes with his own. They were watery and surrounded by so many tiny wrinkles that his skin looked made of paper. In that brief moment, Miranda could see the weight of years and anguish weighing down his slight frame. He sighed, appearing to collect his thoughts. "Doing what I do, most times I'm no more alive than those androids. But then I see you poor little creatures ageing and shrivelling before your time, and I remember that I'm flesh and blood, too." He shrugged. "Or maybe I'm just tired of the same old routine. Who knows? Charity or sick boredom, just be glad I'm turning it to your favour."

Miranda felt the seam seal up along her back. She began to put on the cowl, but stopped, stomach churning. She bit her lip. If this was really her chance to get out of here, she should do it. Just go and not look back. The Doctor was always doing what he could to keep her safe. When things got bad, he was always the first to tell her to get away. He would understand, wouldn't he? He'd understand her needing to take advantage of an opportunity. She shouldn't feel guilty.

But…

A little, selfish, hopeful part of her wilted. "I can't go without the Doctor," she found herself deciding.

Goran smacked his face with a paw. "You can, and if you know what's good for you, you will."

"No, I—"

"The Doctor would want you to. If you stay, I guarantee you'll just end up decrepit and useless like the others. He wouldn't want that for you. The best way to help him is to ease his mind and let Kamelion get you away from here."

Miranda shook her head. "If there's a way back home that's this simple to find, then—"

"Home! You're giving me too much credit, pet. If I had a way home, even I would have made a run for it by now."

"Then what—?"

"As I understand it, the inside of the Doctor's—er, Doctors' TARDIS—er, TARDISes, I guess—exist in their own dimension. If you go inside the TARDIS, you should stop suffering from the accelerated passage of time out here. Now, the TARDISes don't seem to be quite working—something to do with wrong dimensional temporal energy or somesuch—so you still can't get back to your proper timeline (I should have been clearer on that point, I guess). It's only a stopgap, but it's the best I can do. I have Kamelion's assurance that he'll get you home safe as soon as possible. "

Miranda was at once both disappointed and relieved. She wasn't going home. But she was going to be taken to the TARDIS. That had to be exploitable in some way.

She nodded and squeezed the cowl over her head, feeling it seal to the bodysuit. The face grille suddenly adjusted to let in a stream of air and enough space to see through. She felt a queer electric vibration tickle her skin and suddenly the suit no longer seemed heavy. She flexed her arms and hands experimentally and felt the casing move sympathetically with her. "Wow," she said, surprised to hear her voice come out of the suit in a harsh, electronic growl, just like the other androids.

She saw Goran take a few steps closer to her and pass a critical eye over her. With the boots on Miranda seemed to be quite a bit taller than she was used to, and the thick material of the suit perfectly disguised her shape. It was empowering, in a way. Goran moved behind her and she felt his paw adjust something at the back of her neck.

"Alright, this should mask your identity on all the usual security scans. Just act like an android and you shouldn't have a problem getting all the way to the TARDIS. But first, you need to get to the android storage, where Kamelion will be waiting to take you the rest of the way. So listen closely…"


	14. Part Fourteen

As the Doctor had suspected, finding the nexus point was easy. The artificial fold in space had trapped quite a bit of fog that was absorbing the leaking energy, turning the whole thing into a giant, faintly glowing cloud. In the darkness, it had all the subtlety of a flashing neon sign. But standing inside it, the Doctor was left feeling slightly stupid. A poorly connected space fold like this should have been a snap to jigger open with the proper tool. Unfortunately Goran had quite literally cleaned out his pockets, and without the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor mused bluntly, he was pretty well screwed.

He pat himself down one more time to confirm that he had nothing useful on him. Even his piece of twine was gone. "Fantastic," he grumbled to the mists around him. He'd think of something. Eventually. The key was not letting on to Miranda that he was clueless. Her enthusiasm was tenuous enough. That reminded him, where was she? She should have found the nexus by now, or at least have started shouting for him. He glanced around the monochromatic fog, trying to spot any indication that she was bumbling around somewhere inside it. "Miranda?" he called out.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

"One of us really should keep an eye on that one," the Eighth Doctor remarked, peeking out the front window, teacup in hand. He glanced back at the Fifth and Sixth and twitched his brows. _'He's going to draw too much unwanted attention.'_

"Be my guest," the Sixth harrumphed, arching his own eyebrows. _'You're right. Obviously he hasn't caught on, yet.'_

"I didn't mean me, necessarily," the Eighth vacillated, raising his cup and crinkling his forehead. _'Remember what happened the last time? Goran's bosses are still watching me quite closely. Anything slightly suspicious and they'll have us all locked away before we can try again.'_

The Eighth and Sixth turned to eye the Fifth. He grimaced and set aside his interruption-plagued novel. _'How much should I tell him, do you think?' _He griped, "Oh all right! I'll go find him!" He heaved himself out of his chair and pulled a rolled hat out of his jacket pocket.

"I'd imagine he's probably found the fog," the Sixth said helpfully, beginning to clean up the tray. He lifted an eyebrow. _'If he's in the nexus, might as well tell him everything. We don't want a misunderstanding like last time.'_

"Right," the Fifth nodded, casting a knowing smirk at the Eighth as he opened the door. He blinked in the unexpected daylight that streamed inside.

The Eighth Doctor straightened and quirked his brows defensively, _'My Delphon has vastly improved since then, may I remind you.'_

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Doctor became aware of another twist in the time stream. Suddenly the fog began to lighten from a dim orange to a pale grey, and finally to the white of daytime. Turning in a circle, he spotted a shifting, swirling shadow moving towards him. "Miranda?" he called again, preparing to accost her with a remark about having spent the night looking for her. She'd find that appropriately droll.

"No, sorry," the figure responded, using his white hat to clear the air in front of him.

The Doctor suppressed a stab of irritation. "Oh, it's you. Don't suppose you have a sonic screwdriver? No, that's right, you let the Terileptils play with it. Say, did you happen to pass Miranda by in the yard?" the Doctor asked, trying to look busy and aware that he was failing at it.

His fifth persona seemed to take the insult in stride and put his hat back on, sticking his hands in his trouser pockets. "No, I didn't. I wondered if I might—?"

The Doctor breezed past him towards the boundary of the nexus, starting to get a little concerned. "That's odd. She should have found me by now."

"We can look for your friend in a moment. I wondered if I might have a word with you, first?" the Doctor's fifth interjected, placing a restraining hand on the Doctor's arm.

Creeped out by the paradoxical situation, he swatted his younger self's hand away. "If you're here to tell me to calm down or have a cup of tea or something, you're wasting your time. I told you, I'm getting out of here, with or without your help."

"Then I should tell you, it's actually the other way round," his fifth remarked with a significant look on his open face. Before the Doctor could ask, he continued, "You see, we have a plan—of sorts—but to succeed, we can't afford any of us acting out and spoiling it. Suspicious behaviour isn't tolerated very well and Goran's superiors have us on a rather short leash."

The Doctor stopped and stared at his other self in amazement. "Then what was all that 'it's hopeless, give up' talk about!" he demanded.

His fifth gestured nervously for him to quiet down. "I told you, this place is full of surveillance equipment and any suspicious activity is immediately put down by the androids. This nexus is something of a security blind spot, so we can talk, but if we stay in here too long—" The Doctor's fifth persona quirked his eyebrows in that strange manner again.

Something about the way he did it struck the Doctor as being terribly familiar. He'd quickly figured out that this unusual temporal dimension also prevented him from establishing psychic contact with his other selves, and he was surprised at how dense his own body language was to interpret without it. He raised his eyebrows quizzically.

His fifth twitched his brows again, as if in confirmation.

Yes! The Doctor suddenly remembered. _'Delphon! Of course!'_ he twitched his brows haltingly, dredging up almost-forgotten wedges of vocabulary.

'_Precisely.' _" Now let's go back into the yard with me before we trigger an alarm," his fifth suggested. "After all, it's impossible to get out this way, we've tried," he added loudly as the Doctor followed him out of the cloud into the back yard of the manor. "But as long as we're out here, fancy a game of croquet?"


	15. Part Fifteen

Goran's directions sounded simple enough, but Miranda had expected more than just a series of plain corridors on the other side of the lab door. Plain corridors, a few sealed, plain doors, all varying shades of utilitarian grey. Decidedly unthreatening, but just the right kind of bland for the monotony to irritate her. In fact, it was actually somewhat creepy. With no labels on any of the doors or halls, Miranda was left counting junctions and doors and realizing how easy it would be to get lost. Worse, Goran refused to say who (or what) his supervisors were, leaving her with absolutely no idea what she could run into around the corner. That was probably the most nerve-wracking part of it all.

Miranda did her best to glide mechanically in her suit; she was glad the sympathetic circuitry wasn't sensitive enough to emulate her trembling knees and hands. Despite its claustrophobic fit, Miranda felt utterly exposed just roaming around like this. She would have much preferred the hidden safety of a ventilation shaft (Lord, is that what she had descended to?), but the vent pipes were too small to accommodate anything larger than a rat. Fortunately, the hallways seemed completely deserted. Either this facility (which Goran also refused to name, describe or speculate the location of) was very understaffed, or it was a graveyard shift.

Following Goran's directions to the letter, Miranda turned down the third junction and stopped in front of the second door. She placed one gloved hand on the sensor pad next to the featureless door and breathed a tight sigh of relief when it beeped innocuously and slid open. The doorway was narrow, just big enough to fit her through, and the room beyond was little better. It was round, about the size of a small storeroom, and the wall was lined with single alcoves. Miranda did her best not to flinch nervously, staring into the blank faceplates of a half dozen other androids.

They stood motionless in their cubbyholes and gave no sign of having noticed her entrance. She hoped that meant they were powered down, or charging up, or otherwise deactivated. But not one to take chances, she spotted a single empty alcove and walked over to it. Trusting that this Kamelion's tinkering was as good as Goran claimed, and she wouldn't get suddenly electrocuted, Miranda turned to face the door and stepped into the alcove.

Score one for Kamelion, she thought as the moments ticked by and nothing unpleasant happened to her. The door opened again and another android walked into the storage room. This had to be Kamelion. Beneath her cowl, Miranda felt her eyebrows lift in surprise at its appearance. She'd been expecting another grey and chrome Power Ranger.

The barrel-chested, slender-limbed, silver humanoid moved with liquid smoothness, an expression of neutral pleasantness fixed on its face. It even had ears, Miranda noticed. The android stopped in the centre of the room and looked directly at Miranda. "Number Eight, you are required," it said in a deep, coarse, yet pleasant voice.

Slipping back into android mode, Miranda stepped away from the alcove. Kamelion nodded once, turned and walked out of the room. Miranda followed, matching his pace easily with her lengthened stride. She couldn't believe they were getting away with this. For the first time in a long while, she began to feel a tingle of excitement about it. She followed Kamelion down the corridor, around a corner and past two more junctions in silence.

"I would imagine that headpiece to be rather uncomfortable," Kamelion suddenly remarked. "If you wish to remove it, it is now safe to do so."

"Really?" Miranda asked, checking for any visible security devices in the corridor. She was again caught off-guard by the electrified quality of her voice.

"Quite. Only androids are allowed beyond the laboratory, and our superiors believe their security measures to be airtight. They don't bother to monitor these passageways."

Miranda gratefully pried at her neck and pulled the cowl off, wiping damp strands of hair out of her face. Recycled air never felt so good. "Who are these 'superiors' you and Goran keep talking about, anyway?"

"They are aliens who are as interested in getting out of this dimension as you are, which is why they've captured the Doctor and his TARDIS," Kamelion answered simply. "Unfortunately, I have never seen them, so I do not know their precise identity."

"Neither does Goran. But if they have a time corridor across the universe, why do they need the TARDIS? And anyway, I thought they were just after the Doctor?"

"The time corridor only works one way. Our superiors can use it to bring things into this dimension, but cannot send anything out. They are hoping to use the TARDIS to rectify this problem, and hope to use the Doctor's unique biology to solve another. Unfortunately for them, progress has been slow on both fronts."

"How did you put that together?"

"Given the nature of the work they have Goran and me doing, it seemed the most logical explanation."

"All I got out of the Doctor was that Goran was torturing him—them—or something."

"That's about what it's come to. But originally, Goran was trying to study the Doctor. Being a Time Lord, the Doctor has the ability to regenerate his body when he ages—"

"So he says," Miranda cut in sardonically.

"You doubt it?" Kamelion queried, sounding surprised.

"Not in theory, but those guys I met a little while ago couldn't be more different from the Doctor if they tried. I mean, they were all just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and acting like they didn't care. That's not the Doctor at all."

"He is a confusing creature. But it's his ability to renew his body that has caught the imagination of our superiors. They must be subject to the same accelerated aging as the rest of you are, and according to Goran's superiors, the mechanism enabling the Doctor to regenerate is essentially biochemical and should be adaptable to their physiology. But something about this temporal dimension has diminished the Doctor's ability to regenerate, and thus Goran has been unable to finish his research. That's why they've had to collect all the different forms of the Doctor. Until Goran succeeds, our superiors have had to keep to the lowest possible level of functioning. And with the Doctor impaired, his TARDIS isn't working properly either. Here we are."

Kamelion stopped at completely nondescript door and opened it with his palm print. Stepping through after him, Miranda found herself in another small, circular room lined with alcoves. But instead of androids, these alcoves held police boxes. There were five of them, all very nearly identical. Miranda's jaw dropped in disbelief.

"Okay, now I believe it," she muttered in awe.

"Yours is over here," Kamelion said, walking towards one of the alcoves. "I've already set up a stasis bed inside it for you."

Miranda strolled in the opposite direction, overcome by curiosity. If these really were past versions of the Doctor's TARDIS, she wondered how much the Doctor had changed it over the centuries. That they were all sitting here, actual and whole, was practically blowing her mind. She didn't have trouble accepting that the Doctor could be interacting with himself in the habitat since they all were physically different people, but all these TARDISes sitting here just screamed paradox.

She couldn't resist reaching out and touching the cool exterior of the nearest TARDIS. The surface gently vibrated with power, no different than ever. With her other hand, she touched the TARDIS beside it. It was the same. Even the frequency and timing of the vibration seemed the same. "Why don't they work right?" she thought to ask.

"That is what I am endeavouring to find out," Kamelion responded. "In my short time with the Doctor I was able to establish a rapport with the TARDIS, enough for the Doctor to convince Goran and his superiors that I would be of use here, and I can pilot it after a fashion, but much of its internal workings are still a mystery to me. Particularly these more…personalised versions. The TARDIS seems to be capable of flight through different dimensions of space, but not through dimensions of time. It could be due to some sympathetic connection to the Doctor himself, or because the time stream itself is incompatible."

"I bet the Doctor would know," Miranda said, strangely comforted by the close presence of the time ship. She found herself resting her head against it, not realizing until now that she was both tired and suffering a headache.

"I'm certain he does, but for obvious reasons he is unwilling to say so. At the moment we are in something of a stalemate."

Miranda sighed. "Right."

Then, out of the blue, she suddenly discovered that she had an idea. In fact, it seemed like a pretty good idea. Possibly Doctor-worthy. Miranda let go of the TARDIS and turned to face Kamelion. "No, we're not, because you just said you can fly the TARDIS through space!"

It was difficult to tell, but the android didn't seem to share her new enthusiasm. "My superiors already know that, which is why they've enclosed this facility inside a spatial limitation field. We're entirely cut off from the outside universe," Kamelion explained flatly.

Miranda waved away his protest impatiently. "Yeah, I get that, but the TARDIS can still work within the field, right? I mean, that's how you know it works at all, right? You can fly it around in here?"

"Yes."

Miranda briefly wondered if this is was the kind of exasperation she was always putting the Doctor through. The idea was so fresh in Miranda's mind that she wondered if it was hers after all, and not something she'd just absorbed from pressing her head against the slightly sentient time ship. "Then that's what we do! We get in the TARDIS, you fly it into the habitat, we pick up a Doctor, come back here, fix the other TARDISes, pick up the other Doctors and all go home! Why wouldn't that work?"

"Because the habitat exists inside its own limitation field, folded off of the larger one we are currently trapped in," Kamelion said without missing a beat. Miranda didn't realize it was possible for an android to sound dejected, but he was managing it beautifully. "The only thing that can penetrate it is the transmat, linked into the time corridor. And before you ask, I can tell you that my superiors personally mind those controls. Your stasis bed is waiting."

Miranda repressed a rather strong expletive and leaned back against the TARDIS, collecting herself, loathe to surrender after the high she'd just experienced. "It can't be that way, there's got to be something else!" She shut her eyes and massaged her temples, wracking her tired brain, trying to get it to think like the Doctor. All she could immediately recall was the last conversation she'd had with him in the yard before winding up here.

And that was just the thing. "Ah!" she exclaimed.

Kamelion seemed to misunderstand her. "Please, don't strain yourself. Let me take you into the TARDIS."

"Yes! Do that! But make it the TARDIS that you know how to fly, okay?"

"I thought I already explained that—"

"No, no, listen, hear me out on this, okay?" Miranda jabbered quickly, "Before Goran got me out, the Doctor said that the limitation field was lacking containment. That there was this thing called a nexus point that was—well, I don't know exactly how it's supposed to work, duh—but I think it's some kind of connecting point in the field that he was hoping he could mess with somehow. Now, all he usually has is his stupid sonic screwdriver, but if we have the TARDIS, then—"

"Then the nexus point could serve as a platform between the two fields, and it might be possible for the TARDIS to materialize there?" Kamelion finished, sounding intrigued.

"Would that work?" Miranda asked, wide-eyed at the possibility.

The android paused for a minute in due deliberation. "I am not familiar with the concept of a nexus point, so I can say with certainty that it's never been tried."

"So it could work?" she asked again, surprised at how desperately she wanted to be right.

"I believe that is a distinct possibility," Kamelion stated finally. He turned towards an adjacent TARDIS. "Come with me."


	16. Part Sixteen

The Doctor's red croquet ball clinked against the hoop and stopped dead. He shook his head in frustration. "I've never played this badly, I'm sure of it."

His fifth persona strode past to him to take his turn. "Too bad about losing those bonus strokes, eh?"

The Doctor twirled his mallet in the grass and stared at his blond incarnation. '_So what is this brilliant plan you've all been so careful not to tell me?'_ "Just stop sending it into the pond."

His fifth self smirked and set up his next stroke, glancing the Doctor's way. '_By now you must have realised that only way out of this place is by transmat. And the only times we're ever let out is either when Goran wishes to study one of us, or if we've broken something._'

'_The_ _damage alarm,_'the Doctor remembered, disguising it as an impressed expression when his fifth self sent his black ball through the next hoop.

'_Yes. From what we've experienced, it's an automated system. As you saw, it picks up the troublemaker and drops off a pair of those indestructible androids to put everything right. Now, over the course of our stay, we've had the chance to get rather familiar with the androids and as far as we can tell, there are only twelve of them, plus Kamelion as a back up. That makes thirteen total.'_

"Good shot," the Doctor said. '_Thirteen androids, one per Doctor, theoretically."_

'_Exactly. Our keepers aren't inclined towards excess, it seems. Except that we've made so much trouble for them that they've had to send the androids in pairs when the damage alarm goes off.' _The fifth Doctor set up his bonus stroke with leisurely confidence,_ 'Assuming the programming isn't terribly sophisticated, all we've got to do is wait for Goran to bring a sixth one of us in, then all of us start damaging the property at once. The system will transmat the lot of us up there and trap all of the androids down here. In theory, that will leave Goran abandoned in his laboratory.' _His black ball struck the stake. "Quite simple, really."

"Oh, sure," the Doctor sneered, '_that might actually work, too, if there's any of us still left alive to do it. I couldn't help noticing none of you are getting any younger.'_

'_I know it's far from ideal, but without Goran's cooperation it's the best we can do.'_

'_Then how long 'til the next one of us gets caught by the transmat?'_

The Fifth Doctor struck his ball awkwardly, missing the next hoop. "Er…" '_Well, that's where it sort of falls down a bit, admittedly. It seems to be more or less luck. I don't think our keepers are sophisticated enough to have built any decent tracking mechanisms into the time corridor. I imagine it's a bit like fishing.'_ The Fifth Doctor met the Doctor's glare with an apologetic shrug. "Your turn."

"Thanks." The Doctor tapped his ball with the end of his mallet, getting back on course for the next hoop, but stopping shy of going through. '_And with us not being able to regenerate, we could just as easily be dead by the time another one of us arrives.'_

'_Or simply too feeble to do anything, yes, that's a distinct possibility.' _"This really isn't your sport, is it?"

The Doctor couldn't help feeling a twinge of wounded pride. His mind wasn't on the game, but even so his aim shouldn't have been so poor. Maybe the combination of accelerated time and Goran's experiment was finally getting to him. "Sport? It's croquet," he snapped, glad Miranda wasn't here to critique him, too. Which reminded him…

He dropped his mallet and looked around quickly. "Something's wrong, she should have found me by now."

"Who?" asked his fifth self.

The Doctor walked towards the pond, looking around the side of the manor house, a bad feeling creeping into his stomach. "Miranda. I sent her this way before I went into the nex—fog. She couldn't have gotten lost or anything?" The Doctor turned an inquisitive face to his fifth self, who had followed him curiously. The Doctor was highly disconcerted to see his other face wince slowly in response. "What? You know where she is?"

The Fifth Doctor hesitated. "Er, well…"

"Oh! I know that one!" the Doctor's fourth persona piped up excitedly, startling the Doctor by appearing suddenly from the hedgerow.

The Doctor stared at this earlier embodiment, reminded suddenly of just how much he'd changed over the years. It wasn't a pleasant recollection. "Where is she?" he asked.

"Not here!" the Doctor's fourth answered with a playful grin.

The Doctor was in no mood for this. "Where!"

"We should have mentioned that earlier," the Doctor's fifth person interjected nervously, "Most likely Goran has taken her, same as with all of our travelling companions."

"That's just what I was going to say!" the Doctor's fourth exclaimed. "At times you're almost as clever as I am. Ha!"

"Why?" the Doctor demanded levelly, flatly ignoring his aged, slightly senile prior.

"Goran's been vague on it," the Fifth Doctor admitted. "The androids don't recognise anyone that isn't a Time Lord, so I suspect Goran's taken to removing them from the habitat so they can't help us escape. Crowd control, maybe."

The Doctor felt tendrils of dread begin wrapping themselves around his hearts. "But they'll age quicker here, too. If you're already showing so much age—" The Fifth Doctor straightened indignantly. "—Come off it, you are—then a human like Miranda, like Tegan…"

The Doctor stared at his other selves, seeing his fear confirmed on their visages. "I can't let that happen to her! Not to another one." He met his fifth self's eyes as he spoke and saw the flicker of guilt it triggered.

"Then you'd better go looking for her, hadn't you?" the Doctor's fourth self intoned. The Doctor saw him pull out his brown bag of jelly babies and hand it towards him, twisting his brows. '_Use them wisely.'_

The Doctor accepted the bag, which was entirely too heavy to hold only candies. He looked and saw it was full of large, smooth cobblestones. He took one out and glanced at his other selves quizzically.

His fifth self glanced at the fourth and shoved his hands into his striped pockets, shaking his head. "I don't think that's such a smashing idea," he shrugged, idly looking towards the manor house, "but then, nobody ever listens to me. Do as you like." He grinned at the Doctor and then turned to the fourth. "I don't suppose you're in the mood for a round of croquet?"

"Well, I was planning to spend the afternoon preening these troublesome feathers of mine, but now you mention it, croquet sounds lovely."

The Doctor watched his fifth self roll his eyes and head back to the abandoned croquet diamonds, his fourth matching strides with him. The Doctor gripped the stone in his hand with determination and turned to face the manor house. There were enough windows to choose from that even if the Doctor's aim failed, it should still get the job done.


	17. Part Seventeen

Stepping into the TARDIS was like flipping on a light switch in a pitch-black room. Miranda had forgotten what a stark contrast it was going from one dimension to the other. After a few moments of dizzy disorientation, she was able to take in her surroundings properly. Kamelion stood behind the console and tabbed a few controls, to no obvious effect.

"Whoa," she breathed, shocked by the small, white room. It was brightly lit, which was unusual enough, but the walls were lined with large, luminescent roundels and the console was small and dotted with instruments like a large, chunky analog television screen and a lever with a huge, red knob on the end. A pair of double doors behind Kamelion must have led off into the rest of the time ship. In all, surprisingly unimpressive. The place looked like a ridiculous pastiche of the TARDIS console room with which she was familiar. She joined Kamelion at the console, shocked by its apparent simplicity and, she found when she touched it, its cleanliness. No grease or wads of crusty dirt stuck in the panels.

"Different, isn't it?" Kamelion commented.

"My, how times change," was all Miranda could think to say. "So which version of the Doctor does this one belong to?"

Kamelion paused midway through removing one of the panels. "This one." Suddenly the android's body began to shimmer and ripple. As Miranda watched in amazement, the android's appearance began to re-solidify into someone else. She blinked, and now saw before her the shaggy, blond-haired Doctor in the beige coat and striped red pants. More shocking was that the android's version appeared considerably younger than the genuine article had. Positively youthful, in fact.

"Oh, of course!" the android spoke in the Doctor's deep voice, and he was overtaken by another quick shimmer. When it subsided, he now appeared exactly like the one in the habitat, thinning hair, thickened middle and all. Miranda was singularly impressed, but just a bit disappointed that she hadn't gotten a longer look at the younger version.

"You've met my Doctor, then?" the blond Doctor/Kamelion asked. Even the voice was a dead-ringer.

"How did you do that!"

"I read your mind."

"Huh? No, I mean, you can shape-shift? What is it, like, holograms or something? Wait, you can read minds?"

With a third shimmer, the android looked like himself again. "In order, yes, not exactly, and yes again."

"Wuh?" Miranda was thoroughly lost.

"In function, my ability to change my appearance is not so different from the TARDIS' telepathic translation circuit. I can become anything you imagine me to be. In my travels with the Doctor, it has proved to be an exceedingly useful skill."

"Oh! I get it. Chameleon. That's incredible."

"Thank you." The android purred, sounding quite pleased with himself.

Miranda decided to take notice of the panel the android was pulling up. "So what has to be done?"

"I must reconnect the power cable to the omni-directional impulse stabiliser. That will charge the temporal relays in the time rotor and—"

"In stupid-speak, please?"

Kamelion set the panel cover aside with deliberate care. "I need to turn it on."

Miranda nodded. For once, it was nice to get the simple answer without all the heavy sighing and eye-rolling sarcasm. "Anything I can do to help?"

Kamelion went down on one knee and opened another panel on the console's base. "How much do you know about Gallifreyan electro-temporal circuitry?"

"Only that it seems pretty prone to shorting out and overloading," Miranda joked.

As if on cue, something inside the exposed base panel flashed with a loud crack. The android quickly withdrew its hand, its fingertips smoking. "I mean about the technology itself, not about the Doctor's skills as an electrician," Kamelion said wryly.

Miranda waved away a small cloud of acrid smoke that drifted into her face, surprised by the android's increasingly complex personality. "You okay?"

"I am undamaged." The android calmly inserted his arm back inside the base panel, and presently several controls on the console lit up.

"Looks like it's on," Miranda observed.

Kamelion withdrew from the base and stood up. "Merely vestigial power in the relays. I will have to go to the power room and restore the flow manually. If you wish to assist me, you can stay here and let me know when full power has been restored. I trust your Doctor showed you how to operate the comm.?"

"He did, on his console. How can I tell when it's all powered up?" Miranda stopped, suddenly aware of an odd beeping coming from somewhere behind her. She turned to eye the console. "What's that noise?"

Kamelion looked over the controls minutely. "It is not the TARDIS."

"You sure?" Miranda asked, confused that the beeping still sounded like it was coming from behind her. Suddenly, she remembered how Goran had made an adjustment to the back of her neck when she'd first put the android suit on. She grabbed her collar. "My neck! Is there something there?"

The android snapped his fingers (Miranda got the distinct impression it was a mannerism he'd picked up from his Doctor). "The transmitter!" He fiddled quickly with the controls and nodded his silvery, translucent head. "The damage protocol has been activated. Your casing is being recalled to the transmat, an unforeseen event, I must admit."

The android's tone was calm enough, but Miranda was no fool. Feeling around the back of her collar, she plucked off a small item and brought it round to look at it. It was a small black chip like the one the crazy Doctor had given her, glowing red and blinking. "Can you turn it off?" As soon as she said it, the beeping stopped on it's own, although it continued to blink insistently.

"No, unfortunately I cannot."

" So what do we do?"

"We will have to return to the android storage immediately, to swap that transmitter with one of the inactive ones."

Miranda glanced towards the doors. She remembered the discomfort of transitioning between the dimensions and did not relish going through it again so soon. "We can't ignore it? Let the system call another android instead?"

"If an android fails to respond, a fault alarm is activated and an android is dispatched to the location of the malfunctioning unit to determine the cause of the failure and correct it."

"You mean it'd find me," Miranda said. "What then?"

"You would be identified as a rogue contaminant and dealt with accordingly." Kamelion moved to the other side of the console and flipped the large, red-knobbed lever. The doors to the outside slid open with a gentle hum.

"Dealt with how? Would it send me back to the habitat?" Even as she asked it, Miranda realised how stupidly optimistic her guess sounded.

"As a recycled slurry of base organic components, yes. And if either of us tried to resist, we'd have to contend with a general alarm, and that would pretty well do in any hope of escaping under our masters' noses."

Miranda's gut twisted. "That sounds fun. I bet Goran gave me this one on purpose."

"The system selects androids at random. He has no way of knowing which ones will be chosen. Still, it is odd that the Doctor would trip the damage alarm again so soon. It must have been your Doctor. We must move quickly."

Miranda watched the android walk past her and out into the storage room without incident. She was tempted to take Kamelion's remark as a barb, but he had a point. The Doctor she was familiar with wasn't really the cooperating type. She reluctantly began to follow Kamelion. "So what'll happen to him?"

"Nothing so drastic, since Goran needs him relatively intact. He'll be transmatted into the holding cell and kept there until the damage has been contained."

Miranda hovered just inside the TARDIS, readying herself for the transition. "The holding cell is also the transmat base?"

"Yes." Kamelion turned to look at her, and held out his hand. "Give me the transmitter, and I will take it myself. There is no need for you to accompany me."

Miranda eyed the chip in her hand and chewed her lip as the tiniest thread of an idea began to form. "So the Doctor zaps in, and then the androids zap out from the same room?"

"One of the androids fills the cell with an anaesthetic gas to first incapacitate the Doctor, and then the androids transmat down. I have fulfilled this role occasionally, myself. The chip, if you don't mind? Time is short."

"Is Goran there to supervise or anything?" Miranda asked.

"Not usually. Please, Miranda?" The android had the full range of emotions, it seemed, as he was now sounding downright fidgety.

Miranda furiously prodded her thread of an idea into something resembling a plan. Her heart started to pound anxiously. "So you have a chip, too?"

"I do."

"In that case," Miranda snapped the chip back into place on her neck and pulled her cowl back over her face, "We're going to swap yours, instead. Can you fit inside an android casing, yourself?"

"I don't understand."

"I'll explain on the way. C'mon." Taking a deep breath, she stepped out of the TARDIS.


	18. Part Eighteen

"Hullo!"

The Doctor pounded on the door of the prison cell in what he hoped was suitably obnoxious manner. He'd been waiting in this holding cell for quite a while now and his patience was wearing thin. "Oi, Goran! Perfectly good Doctor here, going to waste!" he pressed his face against the clear screen, trying to look up the corridor for any sign of the androids. The sooner they got here, the sooner they'd take him to Goran, and the sooner he'd be able to rescue Miranda.

Admittedly, there were still a few grey areas in his plan, but he was good at improvising. Usually. Wasn't he?

The Doctor got tired of leaning against the door and plunked down in the middle of the floor to wait some more. It was a very uncomfortable floor.

"I don't even need a cot," he grumbled to himself, "a hard bench, that's all I'd ask for. Even Hitler gave me a bench! Call this a prison—"

Just then, two androids stepped into view. The Doctor jumped to his feet. "About time! Seriously, where can I lodge a complaint about the service in this place?"

"Stay calm and relaxed," one of the androids intoned, reaching towards the outside control panel.

"Right! The gas!" The Doctor rubbed his hands together and sat down in preparation. He closed his eyes and waited to hear the hissing of the vent. "Okay, gas away!"

He heard an electric whine, instead.

Opening his eyes, he saw his cell door slowly sliding open. When the opening was large enough, the second android _pushed_ the first into the cell, then darted in after. The Doctor scrambled to his feet.

"What's going on?" he asked.

In reply, the second android reached up, detached something from the back of its head and dropped it on the floor. The first android did the same. "Stand clear," the second android directed.

The Doctor took a step back, and was promptly blinded by the SNAP! CRZZZ! of the transmat. When he could see again, whatever the androids had dropped on the floor was gone. The Doctor looked to the androids, hoping for an explanation, when the second android then proceeded to take off its head!

…Revealing a different, distantly familiar android head beneath. The android extended the discarded headpiece towards the Doctor, as if it were some kind of gift.

"You will need this, Doctor, and I will be needing your jacket and trainers," the android remarked calmly.

The Doctor accepted the proffered head in disbelief. "Kamelion!" He turned to the second android. "So who are you, then?"

The second android also pulled its head off. "I'm Luke Skywalker, and I'm here to rescue you!" Miranda answered with a bright grin.

"You're alive!" the Doctor exclaimed, shaking her by the shoulders in delight. Once his relief subsided, he realised what she'd said, and released her with a dismal groan.

"What?" Miranda asked.

"All the great literary works produced on your planet, and you pick 'Star Wars'?"

Miranda wrinkled her nose at him and dumped two small, black objects out of her spare head into her hand. "It was either that or, 'we're not the 'droids you're looking for.' Anyway, hurry up and swap costumes with Kamelion. He's going to stay here and pretend to be you, while we fool the security system by pretending to be androids so we can get to the TARDIS."

"You found the TARDIS?" the Doctor couldn't believe his luck. _See, _he told himself, _the pieces always come together eventually!_

"Yeah, but it's not exactly functional. We were hoping you'd know how to fix it. The whole dimension thing—"

"Quantum signature incompatibility. The same thing that's handicapping me is handicapping the TARDIS," the Doctor assumed. He glanced at Miranda, and saw that familiar looked of glazed disinterest in her eyes.

"Right," she agreed gamely. "Now strip! Your jacket and shoes won't fit in the casing and Kamelion tells me that having your clothes with their psychic imprinting will help him hold the disguise."

The Doctor swapped his jacket for the rest of the android skin and kicked off his shoes. The casing was a tight fit, but he felt the material stretch just enough to accommodate, and when he was inside, he felt the back seam close on its own. "Self-sealing! Must be memory-tex. Like programmable rubber," he added for Miranda's benefit.

She shot him a look he didn't immediately understand. "Like an electrical current causes the molecules to re-align themselves according to a pre-set matrix? I was only gone a year, Doc, I do have my own memory, you know."

"Sorry." The Doctor smirked privately at Kamelion and prepared to slip the headpiece on. "You better suit up, too."

"Indeed," the android answered, standing at the ready.

Hoping his neurons were back in proper firing condition, the Doctor dusted off his telepathy skills and concentrated.

Kamelion began to shimmer and change, and then, disconcertingly, the Doctor was again standing face-to-face with himself. Provided, this was a different kind of disconcerting than he'd been dealing with all day, because this one wasn't actually him, and was physically identical.

Well, almost physically identical. "Are my ears really that big? Blimey."

Kamelion put on his leather jacket and adjusted the fit slightly. "Comfy," he said with the Doctor's voice.

"Yeah, well, don't get used to it, because I'm coming back for it first thing."

"No problem. Now, off you go, before Goran comes round and catches us with our trousers down, metaphorically speaking," Kamelion answered.

"He does a pretty convincing you," Miranda commented cheekily, fixing one of the tracking devices to the back of her neck. She tossed the Doctor the other one. "Here."

"That's the point." The Doctor snapped it into the slot on the back of his neck and slipped the headpiece on. In a few seconds, the face grille had adjusted and the suit was moving sympathetically with him. "So lead on, Obi-Wan."

Miranda put her headpiece back on, but seemed to be having some kind of ventilation trouble. "Luke, I am your father," she intoned through the suit's speaker.

_Oh. Not a vent problem, then_. "Quit fooling around, Miranda."

She headed towards the door of the cell. Turning back to him, she added, "I find your lack of faith disturbing."


	19. Part Nineteen

Miranda was so thrilled that her plan was working that she nearly forgot where she was going. She was still feeling a little disoriented after she and Kamelion left the TARDIS. Slightly drunk, actually, with a small pain in her hip that she hadn't noticed before. But mostly she was impressed with her problem-solving skills. The Doctor followed silently behind her as she wound her way to the door, sighing with relief when her glove print opened it to reveal the android storage on the other side. She walked in and waited for the Doctor to join her before popping the chip off the back of her neck. She watched the Doctor parrot her actions.

Miranda turned away from him to survey the dormant androids, trying to remember which one she'd taken the chip from. Fortunately Kamelion had been right about the security; they'd essentially marched into the Doctor's holding cell registering as four androids, and nothing seemed to notice. Still, she didn't want to risk another unexpected crisis. She found an android missing its chip and clicked her pilfered one into place. She jerked her head to indicate that the Doctor should do likewise, which he did, and then dutifully followed her back out of the storage room into the naked corridor.

Miranda paused at the next junction and leaned against the corridor, hoping the slight reprieve would ease the mild burning in her hip. She pulled her hot headpiece off, basking in the cool air against her clammy skin. "Okay," she said, adjusting her dishevelled braids, "According to Kamelion, we should be pretty much invisible to the head honchos now, so you can take the head part off."

"Right, so where is the TARDIS?" the Doctor asked, baring his own head.

At times like these, Miranda envied him his buzz cut. "This way." She hauled herself off the wall and started down the left corridor. After a long straightaway, they came to another junction. Miranda paused, trying to remember the serpentine path she'd taken to the TARDIS last time. Unfortunately, Kamelion had been leading her, and Miranda had a bad habit of not paying very close attention when someone else did the navigating.

Also, the pain in her hip seemed to be worsening with use, and that didn't help her concentration. She suspected they'd gone left here, so that's what she did. This corridor seemed shorter than she remembered, and before very long she came to another intersection. The lighting in this one seemed to be a little darker than normal, and that definitely didn't seem familiar. Miranda made another left, hoping that would bring her back to one of the previous junctions and put her back in more familiar territory. She tried to walk confidently and not betray her uncertainty.

But, wow, did her hip hurt! She tried to think what she might have done to it, but other than her tumble from the TARDIS when they'd first arrived here, she came up blank. She tried to keep going, but part way down the corridor, she absolutely had to stop. She leaned against the wall and massaged the joint, hoping to be inconspicuous about it. "I think it's just up ahead," she lied.

"What's wrong with your leg?" the Doctor asked.

So much for inconspicuous.

"It's my hip, not my leg, and I don't know," Miranda admitted. "Must have banged it up when I fell out of the TARDIS. Anyway, it's fine." To illustrate her point, she stopped rubbing her hip and straightened. "Come on." She forced herself to keep walking, even though the short rest really hadn't done anything to alleviate her discomfort.

A few junctions later, the corridor curved right and came to a three-way intersection. Miranda hadn't come across any of these before, she was sure of that. She felt her heart begin to pound in that slightly panicky way she hated so much. She hesitated, thinking that the best thing to do was probably to turn around and retrace her steps back to the android storage and start over. Which would mean admitting to the Doctor that she was lost.

"Do you know where we're going?" the Doctor asked in that slightly patronizing way of his that always succeeded in making Miranda feel about three inches tall.

"Yes, I know where we're going!" she snapped back. She tried to step forward, but her leg suddenly gave out and she ended up catching herself against the wall, her hip burning like crazy. "Ow! Okay, maybe not exactly. All these dumb hallways look identical," she admitted, distracted by the sharp, hot agony in her joint. "Should've asked Kamelion for more specific directions before we left the cell. Sorry."

"Fantastic," the Doctor griped, crouching beside her. "Does it hurt bad?"

Miranda massaged her hip (even though it didn't seem to be helping) and nodded. "It started out just kind of vague and dull, but it's pretty bad now."

"Can you move it alright?" he asked.

Miranda tried to lift her leg despite the pain, but her hip seemed stiff. She shook her head and extended an arm for the Doctor to help her up, which he did. She limped on her leg, surprised at how quickly the joint had locked up. "Must have jarred it worse than I thought."

"I don't think it was your fall," the Doctor said, "Sounds more like osteoarthritis to me."

"Nice diagnosis, but arthritis doesn't suddenly knock you out in five minutes, Doctor. And anyway, I'm too young for that."

"I wouldn't be so sure," he commented grimly. "You've also started to go grey."

"What!?" Miranda temporarily forgot the burning in her hip as she grabbed at her braids. She pulled them loose and tugged a length of hair down in front of her eyes. Sure enough, several strands were visibly bright grey against the muddled brown. Not one to get hung up on looks, she was nevertheless quite sure that her hair had been all muddled brown the last time she brushed it. Hair didn't go grey in a single day. That was impossible. After all this time, she should have stopped being surprised to find impossible staring her in the face, but she couldn't help it. But this was worse than surprising, this was downright ominous. "Oh no. You don't think it's the temporal dimension beginning to affect me, do you?" she asked, fully aware of the likely answer. Gazing up at the Doctor's sober face, she didn't need him to say anything. "Huh. No wonder Goran was in such a hurry to lock me up," she reflected, pulling her limp hair back into a simple ponytail.

"Goran? What did he do to you?"

Miranda saw the fire leap back into his eyes and felt slightly comforted. So he did care a little about her, after all. "He helped me to escape in the first place." Miranda explained quickly how the little alien had arranged for her to get put into stasis in the TARDIS, but when she and Kamelion got to talking, they decided to try to repair the TARDIS and fly it into the nexus point instead. "Which was when you got brought in, which made me think that if we could use the android casings to get this far, why not use them to spring you out of the holding cell so you could fix the TARDIS directly?" She couldn't entirely suppress a satisfied smirk, reflecting on the sheer brilliance of it all.

"So this was your idea?" the Doctor remarked.

"I guess, unless the TARDIS is osmotic."

"Not bad. Would have been better if you'd actually remembered how to get to the TARDIS," he added. "Then I'd have been downright impressed. But not bad. Let's call it a C minus."

Miranda shot him a withering glare. "You're so lucky I can't lift my foot right now."

"Your hands still work?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Then toss me your extra hair band."

"What for?"

"Just do it."

Miranda gave him the hair tie and watched him put both hands behind his back for a moment. He brought both fists out and held them in front of Miranda.

"Okay, pick one," he said.

Miranda stared at him for a second, trying to figure out what point he was trying to make. "What?"

"Which hand? Pick one."

"Why?"

"Something I used to do a lot. Pick one."

Miranda rolled her eyes and decided to play along. "This one," she said, tapping his right fist.

The Doctor turned his hand up and opened his fist. It was empty. He opened his left wrist to reveal the hair band. "Okay. We go…" he stared at the three-way intersection thoughtfully, "…straight. Come along."

"What the hell was that?" Miranda griped, limping down the hallway after him. "If anything, the thing to do is go back the way we came, because—"

The Doctor stopped in front of a door and stuck a hand in Miranda's face to quiet her as she limped up to him. "Does this door look different to you?" he asked suddenly.

Miranda studied it minutely. "No. Why? Does it look different to you?"

"Not in the slightest," the Doctor decided. Staring at it hungrily, the Doctor rested his gloved palm against the security pad. The door beeped softly and slid open.

Immediately, Miranda detected a strange pulsing sensation flow out of the door, like a massive mechanical heart was inside. She peered around the Doctor into the room, uncertain what to expect.

The room was large, certainly bigger than any of the storage rooms, and more sparsely lit. In the centre of the floor sat a control console not unlike the one in the TARDIS, but devoid of a central column. The room was deserted. The Doctor walked in and Miranda inched in after him, jumping when the door slid shut behind her. The Doctor gave her a strange look and she felt her cheeks colour slightly in embarrassment. The walls of this room, largely bathed in shadow, flickered and danced with small blinking lights. When Miranda's eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that the walls were absolutely covered with control panels. Along the right side, however, was what appeared to be an industrial-sized roll cage, bolted to the floor and sporting a ramp that led from the centre of the roll cage to the control console. The rhythmic thumping noise seemed to be emanating from the very walls.

Miranda heard a low chuckle and looked at the Doctor. He had the look of a little boy that had just been unleashed on a Toys R Us. It was a look she understood all too well.

"What is this?" she asked, noticing a door on the opposite wall.

"Do you know where we are?" the Doctor asked excitedly.

She spotted another door behind the roll cage. "No idea."

"Do you realise what we have just walked into, Miranda?"

It was obvious he wasn't paying attention to her anymore. "'Battlestar Galactica'?" she guessed tiredly.

"This is fantastic!" the Doctor effused.

"Why?"

"You, Miranda, you are my lucky charm!" the Doctor exclaimed, clapping her heartily on the back. He practically sprinted up to the central console room and started examining it up close.

Miranda felt a nervous twinge in her gut. Nothing good could come of the Doctor playing with someone else's technology. "Erm, Doctor?" Miranda limped up behind him and eyed one of the monitors. The display immediately struck her as being quite familiar. The Doctor danced around to the other side of the console, but Miranda stayed where she was, trying to place where she'd seen the image before.

"I recognize this technology," the Doctor remarked, sounding less than thrilled. "Stupid me! I should have realised it from the start."

Miranda remembered. "This is the time corridor!" she exclaimed.

"Close. These are the controls for the time corridor. And if I understand this layout correctly…"

Miranda looked up and saw the Doctor, brow furrowed in deep concentration, start twisting a knob with one hand and furtively tap keys with his other, staring intently at a monitor screen opposite Miranda.

"What are you—?"

Suddenly, the interior of the roll cage burst with white light and the mechanical drumming turned into a rushing. Miranda looked away, blinking away stars until the light lessened. When she turned back, she saw the white light was now organised into a spectrum, and rolling like a television screen that had lost its horizontal hold. The rushing dimmed to a gentle buzz.

She looked at the Doctor, who was staring at his screen like a cat with its eye on a lame bird. He slowly took his hands off of the controls, and then suddenly jerked them up into fists.

"Ha!" he exclaimed victoriously.

"What?" Miranda asked, thoroughly baffled.

The Doctor looked at her as if for the first time, came around and pulled her back from the console. "Don't touch anything. Come on, we have to get out of here."

No sooner had the words left his mouth then the air filled with a high-pitched screech the likes of which Miranda had never heard before. Her poor eardrums! "Geez! What the hell—?"

"Like I said, time to go!" the Doctor repeated when the klaxon ended. He rushed towards the door they'd come through when Miranda heard the distinctive whoosh of another door open behind them.

"HALT! DO-NOT-MOVE!" a voice, like the androids', only pitched at more of a shriek, demanded behind her.

Miranda pulled up short, nearly running into the Doctor, who was rigid in place. He whirled around suddenly, his intense blue eyes wide in an expression so full of horror that it struck Miranda's blood to ice. She couldn't imagine anything that could elicit such a reaction from the Doctor and for a moment was too petrified to turn around and see it. She heard the other doors slide open.

"HALT! DO-NOT-MOVE!"

"DO-NOT-MOVE!"

Several more of the shrill, mechanized voices cried out in a surreal chorus, producing a stereo effect on Miranda's ears. She turned around, realizing as she did so that she now stood between the Doctor and whatever these things were.

What she saw defied any common sense explanation she could come up with. Robots. Tall, somewhat cylindrical robots with domed heads and single, glowing eyestalks, and rows of roundels on their bodies from which sprouted a pair of ridiculously impractical-looking limbs: a plunger, and a deformed egg whisk. There were five of them, and they rolled slowly across the floor, evidently aiming to surround Miranda and the Doctor. If it weren't for the Doctor's obviously terrified reaction, Miranda would have laughed.

"This isn't possible," the Doctor spluttered.

"YOU-WILL-BE-SILENT!"

"What are they?" Miranda asked.

"YOU-ARE-OUR-PRISONERS!"

"Daleks."


	20. Part Twenty

Miranda watched the tall, unattractive ring of screeching robots tighten around them, wondering what about them could inspire such a tone of fear in the Doctor's voice. "What are Dal—?"

Ka-BOOM!

Before she could finish, a violent explosion ripped through the controls on the far side of the console. A wall of heat hit Miranda's face, and the Daleks began screaming even more loudly. It was a truly awful sound, one that raked at her eardrums and her nerves and made her want to cover her ears. The cacophony was joined by a blaring klaxon.

"Time to go!" the Doctor said into her ear, and the next thing she knew, she was being tugged through the dying flames and acrid smoke, past several disoriented Daleks and out the door into the corridor. "C'mon!" he ordered, flying into a sprint, dropping her arm.

Her hip complained angrily at the pace, and her head was ringing from the blast, but Miranda did her best to keep up. The Doctor didn't blow things up and run away unless he had a darn good reason. Pivoting to follow him around a corner, Miranda felt her hip go. She heard a sickening CRACK and her leg buckled beneath her. She crashed to the floor, in too much pain to even breathe.

When the pain subsided enough to be tolerable, Miranda looked up in time to see the Doctor rapidly disappear down the corridor. Miranda tried to get up, but she couldn't get her leg to move. It must have been completely dislocated.

Collapsing to the floor again, Miranda was about to call after the Doctor to come help her, when she became aware of a distinct humming sound behind her.

"YOU-ARE-AN-ENEMY-OF-THE-DAAAALEKS!" the robot chanted volubly.

Miranda twisted around and saw the Dalek approach her, its eyestalk glowing with a steady blue light. From the floor, looking up, the thing's stiff, ungainly casing and sheer lack of moving parts lent it a slightly menacing air. Its slow trundle towards her was now a cause for trepidation as well. Would it stop when it got close, or roll over her? The thing seemed awfully confident of its position of superiority, and Miranda suddenly wondered what kind of secret talents the thing must have to justify it.

The Dalek stopped a few feet away, angling its eyestalk down at her. "YOU-ARE-AN-INTRUDER, YOU-WILL-BE-EX-TERRRR-MINATED!" it declared, its harshly inhuman voice overpowering the ringing in her ears.

Miranda wasn't familiar with these robot-things, but she knew the drill well enough. She began to lift her hands, to show she didn't intend to fight back. "I surr—"

Suddenly, a beam of light erupted from the egg whisk thing on the Dalek's front, and Miranda's insides burned with a pain that left no doubt in her mind as to why the Doctor had run from the very sight of them. It was so intense and unexpected that Miranda didn't even have time to realize her fate, and so terrible that it made the darkness which followed not come soon enough.

-----------------------------------------

The Doctor skidded to a stop, suddenly noticing that he didn't hear Miranda's hurried footfalls behind him. "Miranda?" He began to turn around, when he heard a sound that chilled his blood to ice: a Dalek death ray. He froze, not even breathing, and waited. No scream. The Doctor started back the way he came. Maybe it missed…!

"INTRUDER-EX-TER-MIN-ATED."

The Doctor stumbled over his feet and landed on his knees as the harsh, electronic truth echoed down the corridor. He could feel a deep chasm opening up inside him. He never should have let her arm go. Her hip was bad; he should have thrown her over his shoulder and run. That would have been the logical thing to do. Why didn't he do it?

_Because you panicked_, he realized with horror.

But how could they be here? _How?_ He'd searched every corner of the universe after it all ended, hunting down each urban legend and piece of scrap metal that had anything to do with the creatures, convincing himself that they were truly gone, convincing himself that the sacrifice had been worth it, because the Daleks were finally, completely gone, save for the stuff of his nightmares.

Forcing himself onto legs that trembled uncontrollably, he went back. He had to find Miranda. No Daleks greeted him as he backtracked, but each step grew more urgent, less cautious, until he was running flat-out, Daleks or no. He turned a corner, and saw her lying on her back in the middle of the intersection. He grabbed the wall to steady himself as his legs stopped moving. He couldn't move. For a long moment he stared at her, his mind a blank, still as the air after an earthquake, just before the avalanche begins.

_No. Please, no. _

But he could smell the singed skin and ozone already, and for a moment thought he might get sick. The Dalek that had shot her was nowhere to be seen (probably recalled to the control room, he found himself speculating distantly). The Doctor knelt by her side and checked for a pulse, his hand shaking from emotion he wasn't going to let himself give into. He was afraid of what he might do. He kept his fingertips over the vein in her neck for much longer than he needed to. His whole arm was shaking, each breath less controlled than the last.

This wasn't just Miranda, this was _all of them_. Every single life callously snuffed out by the mindless hatred of creatures that never should have existed in the first place. Creatures he once allowed to live, for reasons all but lost at the bottom of a mass grave filled with their victims. She was every innocent that died in one last, desperate effort to wipe the universe clean of their cancer, whose blood still coated his own hands and whose destruction still hung heavily from him like a dead albatross.

He grabbed her under the arms, draping her over his shoulder, feeling how her body seemed so much heavier in the limpness of death, and started to make his way back to the laboratory. He tried to think strategy, with Miranda's dead weight on his shoulders. It was time to put the plan into action.

_Should have sent her back to the laboratory as soon as I found that control room. _

What if Goran had discovered Kamelion in the holding cell? There could be androids waiting for him.

_Should never have let her talk me into this plan in the first place. It was _my _job to get us out of here, not hers! _I_ was responsible. How could I forget that?_

There might only be a dozen androids, but how many Daleks were there?

_Should never have gone looking for her when her year was up, asking her to come back, to shrug off John's death and keep travelling with me. Should have taken her back to her own time as soon as she finished at the funeral. _

The time corridor would be depositing its newest find in the habitat at any moment, and there was no more time for his other selves to idle away on tea and chess. They needed to move on this. He had a job to finish. For Miranda's sake, and for his own.

Despite her added weight, the Doctor was soon sprinting. He told himself it was to make sure he out-ran any Daleks that happened to spot him. Unfortunately, he couldn't out-run his thoughts:

_Should never have taken her with me at all. Should have remained alone. I killed her._


	21. Part 21

"That ill-tempered, obnoxious, uncooperative and _badly dressed_ excuse for a regeneration is going to get us all locked away for good!" the Sixth Doctor complained vigorously as he bent double to sweep tiny shards of broken glass out of the carpet.

"He was just trying to rescue his friend," the Fifth Doctor protested calmly, holding out a bag for his future self to dump the rubbish into. "We've all tried that."

The Sixth groaned with effort as he straightened up and dumped the contents of his dustpan. "But you didn't have to help him! He's nothing but trouble, that one! Impatient and reckless, and that's the last sort we need mucking with our plans! What were you _thinking_, man?"

Five squared his shoulders. "That maybe a dose of impatience is exactly what we've been needing."

"Hah, speak for yourself! I may be a lot of things, but _indolent_ is not one of them!"

Five rolled his eyes at the duster being waved at his nose, then turned serious eyes on his other incarnation. "I wasn't suggesting that. But when was the last time you thought about Mel, hmm? We may have centuries left to wait around for a solution to present itself, but she hasn't. Nor do Tegan, Turlough or Leela. You can't deny that we've grown apathetic in this place, despite our efforts to the contrary."

The Sixth Doctor matched his severe gaze, but had no ready retort. Like it or not, the feckless one had a point. He tugged self-consciously on his bright coat and cleared his throat. "That's as may be. Perhaps. I'm just saying you might have encouraged a less...disruptive sort of damage, especially since those androids decided to bugger off and leave us to pick up the mess, apparently!"

"Yes," Five agreed thoughtfully, glancing out the broken window at the deserted back garden, once more draped in the deep blues of evening. "That is odd." He turned back to Six. "I wonder if that's a good sign or bad?"

"Who knows?" Six shrugged dismissively, setting his dustpan aside and rubbing his back, which was aching from all the steep bending. "I'm getting too old to be doing all this, anyway. What say we break for tea?"

"A very civilised suggestion! After you, Doctor," Five agreed heartily, setting the bag of rubbish and damaged property aside.

"Why thank you, Doctor," Six bowed and led the way to the kitchen.

With their backs to the window, neither Doctor saw the silhouetted figure of the Fourth Doctor pause in the grass just outside the house and stoop to pick something up. He turned the small, red, blinking object over in his fingers and glanced around, staring towards the back gate with particular interest. "Expecting another guest, are we?" he murmured to himself, slipping the biochip into his pocket.

He started to walk on, when he noticed a second red, blinking chip lying in the grass by the broken window. He picked it up as well, and looked around the grass to see if there were any more. There weren't. He pulled the first blinking chip out of his pocket and studied them both minutely, then looked over at the broken window. "No, you can't be a gift, you've just run away from home, haven't you?" he asked the biochips. They continued to blink at him. He grinned. "Clever, clever! Someone's taken you from your androids. Fooled the system, that's wonderful. Well," he said, pocketing the pair of chips, "Let's just re-program you two anyway, just for fun, eh?" Chuckling to himself, he headed back towards the pond.

"Good evening, Doctor."

The Fourth Doctor pulled up short and turned to see his Eighth incarnation stroll up to greet him. Usually the others didn't come out this late. "Er, yes. Yes, it is. How do you do? No wait, never mind, I'm not really that interested. Far too busy ruling Gallifrey, you know."

"Oh, yes, I can imagine. Please, don't let me interrupt your conversation," Eight responded easily, but appearing disinclined to leave.

"Er, conversation?" Four repeated confusedly.

"Yes. I assume that was Omega or Flavia or someone else equally important you were speaking to through your fingers just now?"

"Oh. Oh, that! No, nothing of the sort. Merely giving my hands a talking to. They've been tremendously inconvenient for me today, dropping things and breaking out into bawdy song at the most inappropriate times. Really quite unprofessional behaviour, considering."

"Ah well, of course. Unprofessional fingers are definitely a hazard," Eight nodded, still not walking away.

Four eyed him suspiciously, wondering what he was up to. "Oh, the worst sort of hazard."

"About as troublesome as blinking pockets, do you figure?" Eight asked.

"As what?" Four asked, looking down at himself with alarm. Sure enough, the pocket in which he'd deposited the biochips was now glowing with red light at a steady interval, shining through the fabric with diffuse brightness. He started backing towards the pond nervously. "Oh, would you look at that! I really must clean this old coat of mine sometime soon. All sorts of things start growing—"

"I saw you pick them up," Eight said plainly, following him.

"I don't know what you mean," Four insisted, backing away more quickly. He reached up and touched the brim of his hat. "Yes, this is the Lord High President speaking." He glanced at Eight, "I really must take this call, if you'll excuse me--"

The Eighth Doctor suddenly lunged at him and snatched his hat off. "I don't think so!"

The Fourth Doctor rushed him, trying to get it back, but the Eighth Doctor was quicker and skittered back, holding the battered hat well out of reach. "Ah-ah, Doctor, not so fast! You'll get your hat back as soon as you show me what's in your pocket!" Eight said in a light, jokey sing-song, but it was obvious to the Fourth that he meant business.

Four tensed himself to run. "Give me my hat, and then I'll show what's in my pocket," he countered.

"I've noticed that every time a new Doctor arrives, you decide to act up and get yourself transmatted to Goran's lab. More interesting to me is how it's never very long after you come back that our companions go missing. I've suspected something about you for a long time, now. Pocket first," Eight responded, dropping his voice an octave to punctuate his point.

Four considered retorting, but in the end decided against it, and broke into a mad sprint towards the pond instead.

"Hey!" the Eighth Doctor called angrily, tossing the rumpled hat to give chase. Seeing that Four was heading straight for the pond, Eight broke off and sprinted around the trees to cut him off. As he veered back towards the pond, he didn't notice a piece of twine strung taunt between two tree trunks. He felt his ankle come up against something, and then found himself tumbling head over heels into the grass.

Four saw him catch on the tripwire and tried to avoid him, but his reflexes were a bit too dull, and he ran into the Eighth Doctor and went flying, too. He came to rest next to the pond and tried to get up despite the dizziness in his head, and promptly fell over again.

The Eighth Doctor got back to his feet, dusted himself off and trotted over to the fallen figure of Four, who was trying to get up a third time. Eight casually stood over him, placing one foot on the Fourth Doctor's scarf, pinning him down. Four rolled over, eyed the Eighth Doctor standing above him, tugged hopelessly on his trapped scarf and groaned unhappily, collapsing to the ground in defeat.

Puffing with exertion and ignoring the bits of leaves stuck in his hair, Eight glared down at his captive. "The contents of your pocket, dear Doctor!"

Four grumpily reached into his blinking pocket and produced the two biochips, holding his palm up for the Eighth to see. "There, satisfied? Running down a harmless old man like me for the sake of a couple of—"

The Eighth Doctor snatched the chips out of the Fourth Doctor's hand and brought them close to his face, recognizing them in the failing light for what they were. "Why did you take these?"

"What on Earth is going on out here?" Six's voice bellowed from the back porch. Four and Eight both looked up in time to see Six come marching down towards them.

Eight looked down at Four. Four looked up at Eight. "Care to answer him?" Eight asked.

Four said nothing.

"You're right," Eight nodded, putting the chips into his own pocket and hauling Four to his feet, "I think all of us deserve to hear your explanation. In fact, I think it's time for tea, isn't it?" he directed the inquiry towards the Sixth Doctor, who had stopped a short distance away and was eyeing them both bemusedly.

"Er, yes, it is."

"Brilliant! Come along, Doctor," Eight exclaimed, tugging on Four's scarf like a leash.

-------------------------------------------------------

The door to the lab opened and the Doctor walked in, Miranda's body heavy on his shoulder. All seemed quiet; there were no Dalek'droids in sight.

"Hullo, Doctor!"

He startled at the sound of his own voice and noticed Kamelion, still in his jacket and trainers, leaning smugly against Goran's torture tube. Goran was encased inside it. "Let me out!" the diminutive alien cried.

_Goran!_

Kamelion rolled his eyes and grinned at the Doctor, polishing a smudge on the tube with his sleeve. "I like your mind. It's fun."

The Doctor noticed a stainless steel examination table a short distance away, and wordlessly walked over to it, laying out Miranda's body carefully. Already the colour was draining from her face, and in this accelerated temporal dimension, the Doctor wondered sickly how long it would be until rigor mortis set in. Miranda—the body--couldn't remain here for long, in any case. He noticed Kamelion approach out of the corner of his eye, shimmering back into his silver android self.

"Doctor—?"

"My jacket," the Doctor requested simply, holding out his hand.

"Is she—?"

"My jacket!" His voice nearly broke. Feeling his emotions boil inside, trying to force their way out, he clutched his jacket tightly, and then, hands trembling a bit, spread the jacket over her torso like a blanket, tucking it beneath her chin. She looked merely asleep. The Doctor knew all too well the catastrophic internal damage a Dalek ray caused, and it struck him as ironic how such a tortuously painful death left its victims looking so peaceful.

Kamelion spoke up softly, "Doctor, I cannot detect any electrical activity in her brain. I cannot detect any metabolic activity—"

"That's because she's dead!" he shouted, charging Goran in the tube, all his conflicting, confusing thoughts steamrolled into pure fury. "She's dead, and you know why? Your masters killed her!"

Goran cowed pathetically. "H-how?"

The Doctor grabbed the sides of the tube, getting Goran's full attention. "Because they're Daleks! You sent her out there with Daleks!"

Goran's eyes widened. "I-I-I didn't know...!"

Suddenly, one of the computer panels lit up and began to beep insistently. _The Daleks?_ "What's that?" the Doctor barked, snapping his head around to watch the door.

"Th-th-the time corridor has picked up another one of you," Goran stammered.

Sighing with relief, the Doctor remembered Miranda's plan and turned to Kamelion, his mind once more back on track. "Can you keep the transmat from taking the TARDIS this time?"

"I cannot."

He turned back to Goran. "Can you?"

"N-no. It's an automated process, triggered as soon as the sensors register that its occupants have left."

Frustrated, the Doctor struck the tube, causing Goran to startle badly. He turned his back to the despicable little creature. Improvising a strategy, he flew into action, stripping off the android body suit he was still wearing, racing to the steel table and taking back his jacket. "Then send me back down right now, and get the android suit off of Miranda. Go!"

Kamelion nodded swiftly and indicated the way back to the holding cell. "This way, Doctor!"

The Doctor grinned and clapped Kamelion on the back, finally grateful for the android's telepathic ability.


	22. Part 22

The sky was a smoky purple when the Doctor fell out of the transmat beam in the back garden. He hit the ground running—not easy when one's molecules are still realigning—but adrenaline dissolved his disorientation with lightning speed. He flew to the back gate and dove into the nexus, racing blindly forward until his shoes tripped over the road edge and sent him sprawling out of the fog. He barely felt the impact. Up ahead, he heard the distinctive groaning and screeching of a materialising TARDIS. The Doctor peered through the gloomy morning dawn towards the hillside on the other side of the road where he'd last seen his own TARDIS and saw the silhouette of a police box take shape, its lantern flashing like a beacon.

"Stay inside," he pleaded, getting up from the road. It slower going than he wanted; his knees felt stiff and his joints in general just didn't seem to want to move very fast. He had to get into that TARDIS! Must be getting old, he thought fleetingly, racing stiffly across the field to the TARDIS.

He saw the door open.

"No! Get back inside!" he shouted. Someone stepped out of the TARDIS and stumbled, collapsing into the grass. "No, no, no! Don't come out!" he yelled desperately as a second individual in a panama hat quickly exited and then also took a dive into the dirt. The Doctor felt his hearts sink, but plunged forward, hoping that by chance he might be able to leap into the TARDIS before the transmat got it. He charged past the two supine figures on the ground and took a flying leap towards the still-open door.

SNAP! CRZZZ!

His eardrums took the sonic boom full-blast and he felt a hot, electrical tingle pass over him as he sailed right through the retreating transmat beam and landed a spectacular face-plant into the dewy grass. _So much for that_. His neck jerked painfully on impact and he was very nearly winded, but it was mostly the sheer weight of disappointment that kept him from getting up quickly. The dejection was a passing malady, however, quickly replaced with overwhelming frustration. This universe seemed bound and determined to fight him on everything!

"Augh! Professor, what's happening?" a pained female voice asked from behind. "Where are we?"

The Doctor rolled over and sat up as the voice triggered a wellspring of nostalgic memories. In the rapidly lightening environment, he recognized the tight French braid and badge-coated black jacket of the young human female staggering over to the other erstwhile TARDIS occupant and helping him up, a loaded rucksack in her other hand with the handle of an aluminium baseball bat protruding through the zipper. Ace and her baseball bat.

"Calm down, Ace, it's a temporal distortion...should soon pass..." the Doctor's seventh incarnation said tightly, his pointed face and thin lips contorted in evident discomfort as he reached out blindly for Ace.

Ace grabbed her Doctor's hand and helped to pull him up. "Right. Yeah. It's getting better already."

Watching the stout little man stagger to his feet, using his question-mark umbrella for stability, the Doctor was almost ashamed to recognise himself clad the Panama hat and question-marked vest. Deja vu all over again. In some ways, he really hadn't changed at all. Should have realised by now that some things never do. He's always been arrogant, and Daleks always come back to take a little more from him. _Miranda._

The Doctor shook himself and stood up. No time to dwell on it; there were always things to do first. At the very least, the original plan could now go forward—assuming this pair was willing to shut up and cooperate quick-like. He really didn't have the patience for any more tea breaks and explanations. If only he'd made his leap a second sooner he could have avoided all this!

"Doctor, the TARDIS, it's gone!" Ace suddenly exclaimed. "You! What you do with it?"

"What, me?" the Doctor asked unassumingly. "Nothing, thanks to you lot. Didn't you hear me telling you to stay inside? Could've had a way out of this mess, but no, you had to go explore!"

"Way out? You know where we are? Why have you brought us here?" the Seventh Doctor demanded, clearly in a foul mood as he slowly adjusted to the new dimension.

The Doctor walked over to the pair, pinching the bridge of his nose, wishing he could telepathically connect with his former self, which would make all this loads easier. He decided to be honest. "It's not what you're thinking. Not even close. But I need your help," he directly addressed his former self, extending his hand, "_you_ need your help."

The Seventh Doctor looked at him with bleary eyes and took his hand reluctantly. "You're a Time Lord," he realised. Composing himself quickly, he sobered and nodded. "Lead on." Ace looked at her Doctor, then back to the Doctor and the hostility in her face disappeared.

Inside, the Doctor did a little victory shuffle. Whatever their faults, this pair cottoned on very quickly. "Okay, then, here's the situation..." he began to explain as he led the pair of them to the road and back towards the manor house.

As he briefed them, the Doctor remembered all too clearly the first time he'd encountered the Daleks with Ace under his wing. And how, despite her capable bravery, she'd ended up surrounded by them, seconds away from the same fate that befell Miranda. _Miranda_. But he'd saved Ace out of sheer good timing, and made it look easy, almost carelessly so. He'd thought back then that he had rid the universe of the Daleks for good. By that point he was so very good at defeating Daleks, wasn't he? Time's Champion. He knew so much. What was it to sacrifice one or two bystanders, to blow up an entire civilisation if need be, if it set things along their proper course in the end? 'Proper course.' What did that even mean anymore? In hindsight, the Doctor could see now how his actions had begun to catch up to him even then.

By the time he'd lead them through the front gate he'd explained as much (or as little, actually) of the situation as he felt necessary.

"But who is this Goran bloke working for?" Ace asked as the rusty gate swung shut behind them.

The Doctor hesitated. Probably best to wait until everybody was around and could hear it at once. "I'm getting to that," he said, leading them up the walk, keeping his eye out this time for any more trip wires and the like. The way was clear.

"If Goran is researching regeneration, why should he need more than one Time Lord?" the Seventh queried.

"Technically, he doesn't," the Doctor responded, having held off on that point until he could prove it visually. "But you can probably feel it by now; this dimension isn't exactly Time Lord-friendly."

"Yes," the Seventh Doctor drawled thoughtfully. "But if we can't regenerate here, then the only way Goran could hope to complete his research would be—"

The Doctor opened the front door and ushered them in. Pulling the door shut and turning around, the Doctor pulled up short at the sight in front of him. His fourth persona was tied fast to a chair by his scarf, and his fifth, sixth and eighth incarnations were standing in a line in front of him, looking down at the fourth with obvious hostility. The Doctor glanced over at Seven and Ace. Seven looked thunderstruck and Ace appeared deeply confused. Doctors Four, Five, Six and Eight all looked up when the door closed with varying expressions of surprise.

"Sorry, are we interrupting something?" the Doctor finally asked to break the stunned silence.


	23. Part 23

_Miranda stood just inside the console room, looking at the shut doors and wondered briefly how she'd gotten there. She could only conclude that the Doctor must have brought her back to the TARDIS after the Dalek shot her. Where was he?_

_Suddenly the air began to fill with piano strains, barely audible at first, but growing louder, like an aroma wafting into the room. Miranda turned around to see that the TARDIS console was a grand piano. As she approached, she saw a handsome young man seated at the keys. It was George Gershwin, looking just as he had that evening that the Doctor had taken her to that party in the 1920's. He noticed her and smiled. She smiled back. He was singing, but she couldn't hear the lyrics. Still, the music was beautiful. She closed her eyes and basked in it._

_Then it stopped. Opening her eyes, she saw George was sitting, frozen at the piano, staring at something behind her. She turned and felt her blood turn to ice. A Sontaran! It raised its gun, and Miranda raced around to the other side of the piano and George stood to defend her. Only he wasn't George any longer. It was John. And he wasn't protecting her, he was holding her in front of himself as a shield, his sinewy arm wrapped around her neck, hard as iron._

"_If you really intend to stop me, you'll have to kill her in the process," she heard him menace beside her ear. She could feel his hot breath on the side of her face. "You won't let him do that, will you, Miranda?"_

_Her stomach twisted and she closed her eyes in absolute revulsion at his presence, at the silky confidence of his voice. He was a slight man, and she had taken self-defence classes. It would have been nothing to wrap her leg around his and thrown him off, let the Doctor finish him. But she didn't. "I'm not doing anything for you! Let me go, John, please!"_

_He jerked her back against him, wrapping his other arm around her waist, squeezing. "I am _not_ John!" he hissed fiercely. "I am the Master, and you _will _obey me! Won't you?"_

No_, she wanted to scream. _No, I won't. You killed a man I loved, and manipulated my feelings. You deserve to die. Once and for all! _Except that would mean killing John utterly, and as much as he kept claiming John was dead, she couldn't accept it. She loved him. For the first time in a long time she'd let herself love someone and she couldn't make herself do it. She could feel this creature inside her head, whispering doubts, encouraging her to follow them. She didn't want to help him, but neither could she stop him. So she stood there in his grip, paralysed by indecision. _

"_I—I'll do whatever you want," she found herself saying, the words pulled from her throat almost involuntarily, "Just let me go."_

_His condescending laugh made her feel inches tall and drained the fight from her. "You already have," he murmured cruelly, his fingers caressing a stray tendril of her hair. With her arms pinned behind his other arm, he let go of her neck and reached for the TARDIS console (now back in place). _

_Suddenly the air was rent with a horrible electronic squeal and Miranda fell, as John pulled her down with his good arm, his other mangled beyond repair by the gun blast. Standing in place of the Sontaran was the Doctor, holding the gun._

_Miranda threw off John's grip and scuttled away, her heart in her throat. She'd never seen the Doctor look like this. There was something completely inhuman about him, his eyes cold fire, and his jaw clenched and tight. It was anger, it was hatred, it was pure, unemotional determination, and it was a million things she couldn't even begin to understand. _

_John slowly, deliberately climbed to his feet, daring the Doctor to shoot again. He gripped the console for support and looked down at his mangled arm, which was pumping profuse amounts of blood down through the floor grating. "Now I'll _definitely _be needing those coordinates, Doctor. I was willing to wait as long as this body remained in tolerable condition, but you've severed an artery."_

"_Then you can bleed to death," the Doctor said harshly._

_John smiled, swaying a bit unsteadily on his feet. Miranda watched the two face each other, saw the image on the scanner of the collapsing star. She should have seized that moment and tackled him before he tried to flip the lever and send the TARDIS to its death in the collapsing gravity field. Neither one of them was paying her any attention; she could have done it. She could have knocked him down, stopped this in its tracks. Stopped the Doctor from killing in cold blood, stopped that…that _thing_ from destroying everything that was good in her life._

_But she didn't._

_She crouched there on the floor and watched as that evil creature used the last of the strength left in John's body to reach for the lever. She watched the Doctor pull the trigger and send John flying backwards, a spray of blood erupting from his chest. She met the Doctor's gaze as he lowered the gun, and held it even as she made her choice and went to John's side when he called out to her with the voice of a frightened young man about to die. She held his hand as the life drained from his face, a chill passing along her spine as she wondered who it was who looked out at her from those clouding brown eyes: the occasionally hot-tempered and brazen, but privately caring human, or the obsessive evil that wanted nothing else but the Doctor's destruction and a new physical form with which to achieve that? _

_She looked back up at the Doctor, overcome by guilt, opening her mouth to explain, to apologise, and finding herself mute with the shock at what he had just done. Knowing she should have stepped in and stopped him didn't make her feel any less that the man holding the gun was a complete stranger. She didn't know him at all. This was her fault. She did nothing when John had changed, and now her inaction had forced the Doctor to become a killer, to stand there holding a smoking gun, a thousand-yard stare on his hardened face. She couldn't look at him. She curled up on the grating, hiding her face, wishing she could just disappear. _


	24. Part 24

"You've all got completely the wrong end of the stick," the Fourth Doctor insisted tiredly.

"If you're so innocent, then why did you run?" the Eighth demanded.

"Exercise," Four shrugged.

"You know what he's asking," Five snapped.

"He's absolutely barmy," the Sixth complained, absent-mindedly offering the tea tray to the Seventh Doctor and Ace.

The Doctor was very close to throttling the lot of them. "This can wait! There's enough of us now, let's do it quickly before the system catches us up!"

"You know, that's a good idea," Four agreed enthusiastically.

"Doctor, you don't seem to appreciate the fact that he's been hiding things from us," Eight argued, turning to glare at the old one, "possibly even working against us all this time."

"Now, that's ridiculous," Five protested, stepping between them. "All the same, if we're going to get out of this we should have as many of the facts as possible." He turned to Four. "Just tell us: did you have anything to do with the disappearance of our companions?"

"Oh yes," Four responded readily.

"Are they dead?" Five asked bluntly.

Four sobered and for the first time the wicked gleam in his eyes was gone. "If they are, it's in spite of my efforts to the contrary."

"No," the Doctor finally interjected, his conscience heavy. "Your companions are being kept in stasis inside your TARDISes. Goran did that. They're still alive." _All but Miranda._ "So let's stop wasting time and get out of here. And for God's sake, untie him," he added wearily, stalking up behind Four's chair and undoing the knot in his scarf.

"How many people have you travelled with, Professor?" Ace murmured to the Seventh Doctor.

"Not now, Ace," he snapped back.

"But what about the bio signalling chips? What were you planning to do with them?" Eight asked Four, as the latter was standing up and putting his scarf back on.

"That's really quite simple, if you stop to think about it. This one is for you," he said, tossing one of the small black objects to Ace. She caught it bemusedly.

"And the other?" Six asked.

Four smiled and pocketed it, the wicked gleam back in place. "Call it a surprise. Now I suggest we all do as our future self suggests and get this little prison-break underway." No sooner were the words out of his mouth than his pocket began to blink.

"Why's it doing that?" Ace wondered aloud as hers began doing the same. Before any of the other Doctors could act, the Fourth Doctor and Ace both vanished in bright flashes of light.

SNAP! CRZZZ!

SNAP! CRZZZ!

"Oh, of course! The chips must have belonged to the androids that should have beamed down to repair the window. They've been recalled by the system!" Eight realised aloud when the ozone cleared.

"What happened up there?" Six asked the Doctor curiously.

The Doctor picked up a pair of clocks from the mantle. "Oh, death, destruction, the usual. C'mon, let's make a mess!" he declared quickly, going off to seek an intact window through which to hurl the clocks, aware of the busy scuffle behind him as his four remaining incarnations hurried off to do the same.

-------------------------------------

_Miranda sensed a change around her and when she looked around again she found herself alone in the TARDIS. It was dark and gloomy, as if the time ship itself were dead. She felt cold. She walked back down the catwalk to the doors and pulled on them, but they didn't open. Something about this wasn't right. Why was she here? Where was the Doctor?_

_"Trying to go somewhere?"_

_Miranda turned around quickly as John's voice echoed through the chamber. She saw him standing idly by one of the twisting columns, in one piece, smiling gently. He leaned against the column and put his hands in his pockets, gazing around the room innocently. "I don't blame you, it's quite dreary in here."_

_"Where are we?" Miranda asked, the surreal feeling getting stronger. Was this really John? It seemed so, but she couldn't be sure. Had they both been taken out of time somehow? Had that horrible scene in the console room not happened yet?_

_John held up a finger, walked over to the TARDIS controls and activated one of the scanners. "Nowhere, apparently," he concluded._

_"You died," Miranda said._

_John continued to play with the inert TARDIS controls, but chuckled. "Yeah, and so have you."_

_"What?"_

_"The Dalek shot you. You're dead."_

_His nonchalant delivery was as unnerving as the words he spoke. "No, that can't be. If I'm dead, then this whole little exchange can't be happening."_

_"How do you know? Have you been dead before?"_

_"Don't patronise me!"_

_"I'm not, I'm just trying to get you to face facts. You're dead. Now accept it so we can both get out of here."_

_"Where is here?" Miranda asked again._

_John shrugged indifferently. "Limbo? Purgatory? The result of a misfiring neuron in your dying brain? Pick whichever suits you, but it's time we left here."_

_"And went where? Heaven?" Miranda found herself sneering the last word, her voice layered with incredulity. "This is an hallucination if anything. I'm going to wake up."_

_John left the TARDIS console and approached, sighing gently. His eyes were full of so much tempting compassion. "I know this is hard to accept, Miranda. I took quite a while to come around to it myself, but you'll get nowhere trying to fight it. The race is over, you're done."_

_Miranda felt stirrings of cagey panic. No, this wasn't right! She couldn't go out like this, the random victim of some ridiculous robot that doesn't know the definition of the word 'surrender.' It wasn't fair. But then, people are always dying in random, insignificant ways, with unresolved issues, weren't they? She'd seen enough of that around the Doctor. John was the perfect example of that. In some ways, it was only a matter of time until the scythe fell on her, too._

_"But there's more I can do!" she protested, feeling her argument begin to crumble._

_"Too little, too late, don't you think?" John remarked cautiously._

_Miranda fell to her knees, his words hitting home. She tried to keep it together, but couldn't hold back a sob. She felt him kneel beside her, his arms around her shoulders._

_"Failure is a terrible thing to live with, I know. But you don't have to anymore, don't you see? It's done. All those regrets and 'should haves' are long past and meaningless. It's time to move on," he urged._

_Move on. That's what she'd tried to do after John was killed. After she begged the Doctor to return to 1908 so that his body could be delivered to his grandmother and buried properly. And then she'd left. She told the Doctor that it would be for a year. He didn't know that the moment the TARDIS dematerialised behind her that she'd turned her cell phone off and left it in the bottom of her bag along with her watch, untouched until the day only weeks ago when that blue box unexpectedly groaned its way back into her life, un-summoned, unwanted, but impossible to refuse. Her mistakes had followed her._

_A breeze passed over her, accentuating the deep chill had started to permeate her skin. She looked over and saw that the TARDIS doors were now wide open, and there was a bright, swirling vortex beyond. John stood up, lifting her up with him. "Come on, that's our signal. They're waiting for us."_

_Miranda looked at the vortex, admiring its pulsating beauty. It was soothing, like watching a flame. "Who's waiting?" she asked softly. As she stared deeply into the light, she saw shapes and images begin to materialise out of it—her mother, dead from cancer when Miranda was barely eighteen, looking vibrant and healthy. She smiled at Miranda and beckoned to her. John walked out in front of her, holding her hand._

_"You see? It's time for a fresh start. Put all that pain and misery behind you. Come on."_


	25. Part 25

The holding cell was already a very cramped space by the time the Doctor materialised inside. He nearly fell over, unexpectedly woozy from so much transmatting back and forth.

"Watch it!" Ace grumped, pushing him away from her.

The Fifth Doctor grabbed his arm to steady him, looking a bit pallid himself. "Well, here we are," he remarked wryly, nodding towards the cell door.

The Doctor turned and wilted at the sight. Eleven androids stood calmly outside the clear door, their blank faces regarding the six Doctors and one human within. "Oh, what a stupid system!" the Doctor complained bitterly. By damaging things all at once, the Doctors had overloaded the system and were all beamed up before any androids could be beamed down, and now the cell was filled to standing-room only, meaning there was no room for any of the androids to come inside and be transmatted back down.

"Why are they staring at us like that?" Ace asked.

"Because I rather expect that we're in their way," the Seventh Doctor answered unhappily.

The Doctor turned on his fifth incarnation. "Didn't think of that, did you?" he quipped. Five shot him a look.

"Luckily," Four piped up from the back, "I did." He elbowed his way to the front of the cell, producing the biochip from his pocket, and to the frank astonishment of the Doctor and all the others, a sonic screwdriver from another pocket. He activated the screwdriver and poised it over the biochip until the little black disc was glowing a steady red. Slipping the screwdriver back into his pocket, he held up the biochip, slotting his thumbnail into the side. Glancing around at his audience, he grinned hugely. "Surprise!"

On cue, there was a massive explosion outside the cell as the head of every single android exploded in a shower of sparks, smoke and debris. The Doctors and Ace all recoiled defensively as bits and pieces of android brain clattered against the cell door. When they were done exploding, the smoking, headless androids stood motionless for a split second and then toppled like bowling pins into a pile of useless body parts. The Doctors and Ace stared in disbelief.

"Ha, ha! It worked!" the Fourth Doctor exclaimed giddily.

"Wicked!" Ace agreed.

"Restrain yourself, Ace," the Seventh Doctor chided.

"You've had a sonic screwdriver this WHOLE time?" the Sixth Doctor cried indignantly.

"Not the whole time. I was months convincing Goran that I didn't plan to escape to get this back," Four explained quickly.

"I knew you weren't as loony as you pretended," Eight remarked shrewdly. "Not quite, anyway."

"Can't help noticing that we're still locked in," Five cut in with another nod towards the door.

The Doctor stood by the door, gazing up and down the hallway anxiously for any sign of Kamelion. "Just hope Kamelion wasn't wearing one of your little detonators."

"Of course not," the silver android purred as he rounded the corner and activated the door mechanism. The Doctor sighed in relief. "I've been well aware of the Doctor's plan for quite some time. Apologies for keeping you waiting." The android stepped back to allow the Doctors and Ace to spill gratefully from the cramped little room. "I must warn you that when the androids fail to report back to their stations it will generate an alarm."

"With the androids gone, who's left to respond to it?" the Eighth Doctor asked.

Kamelion hesitated, deferring to the Doctor. The Doctor stopped in his tracks, working his jaw. As long as he didn't say it, it was almost as if he could pretend it wasn't real. That Miranda wasn't cold and dead on a utilitarian steel table in the laboratory, that everything he'd gone through hadn't just been rendered completely, cruelly insignificant. "Daleks," he said.

Six heads snapped to attention.

"What?" the Seventh queried sharply.

"Goran's masters are Daleks. I saw them. They built the time corridor and they're defending it with lethal force." He watched their reactions, and though he couldn't sense them telepathically, he knew their thoughts were unanimous.

"Regenerating Daleks," Five rumbled.

"With access to our TARDISes," Six added.

"And a time corridor," Eight murmured.

"Yea," the Doctor nodded curtly, "But it's even a bit worse than that. Miranda and I sort of tweaked the time corridor a bit in order to bring in New One over here, and then exploded the controls a little, which sort of alerted the Daleks to what was going on. But it probably won't take them long to repair the damage and try to duplicate my tweaking, which means we could be getting a lot more crowded very quickly if we don't stop them first."

Five familiar faces stared at him with utter disdain (Ace merely looked casually confused).

The Doctor smiled uncomfortably and shrugged. "Needs must. Sorry."

"Well then, I suggest we split up and tackle this problem from multiple angles," Six suggested, breaking the miffed silence.

"I agree," the Doctor clapped his hands together in a show of enthusiasm, eyeing the assortment of characters around him. "So, New One and Hair, you two take charge of repairing the TARDISes, Kamelion can show you the way. Patches and Beige, you fellows get to the time corridor and shut it down before the Daleks completely remove us from history, I can tell you how to get there in a mo'. And Scarf, up for a little Dalek hunt?"

"Who put you in charge?" Six complained loudly.

"Seniority. Ace," the Doctor turned to the girl, "What's in your bag?"

"Way ahead of you, mate," Ace responded, pulling several canisters of Nitro-nine from her rucksack.

"Fantastic! Each team gets one, though Scarf and me should each have our own, just in case.

"Perhaps these would be useful to have, as well," Kamelion remarked.

The Doctor turned, surprised that he didn't notice the android slink off the laboratory. He stood now with a tray containing an assortment of objects, including a piece of string, a yo-yo, and…

"My sonic screwdriver!" he exclaimed, picking the tool up from amongst the riffraff and noting carefully that it was undamaged. "Kamelion, I could kiss you!" The android paused reluctantly. "But I won't," the Doctor added quickly. Kamelion nodded and moved off so the others could collect their personal belongings. The Doctor put his screwdriver back into its usual jacket pocket, feeling almost whole again. He noticed the Fourth Doctor sidle up to him as the others got themselves sorted.

"So you found Miranda?" he asked.

"Actually, she found me. She hides it well, but she's a pretty clever girl when she applies herself. Not quite a Romana, but for a human…" he stopped abruptly, surprised to find his voice perilously close to breaking. He pulled out his screwdriver and fiddled with it for something to do.

"Where is the poor girl?" Four asked pleasantly.

The Doctor drew a careful breath, pretending as though he'd only half-heard. "She's not coming."

"I imagine the Daleks would have given her a bit of a shock," Four agreed.

The Doctor looked at him sharply, realising belatedly that it was an innocent remark. It was getting harder and harder to keep shoving everything aside. He pocketed his screwdriver and walked towards the lab without another word. He didn't trust himself.

"Doctor," one of his former selves called after him.

"Wait here," he instructed brusquely without a backwards look. He stormed into the lab, a man on a mission, and came to a stop in front of the tube, still occupied by a browbeaten Goran.

"Doctor, I can't begin to express how sorry I am about your human friend! I swear to you, I never intended—"

"Do you mean that?" the Doctor interrupted coldly.

Goran paused and blinked. "Oh, y-yes, if there was anything—!"

"Then shut up and think! The Daleks chose you to do their work for them. Daleks are geniuses, which mean they must think pretty highly of you to trust you to manipulate their DNA."

"I-I suppose—"

"Shut up! Now I'm telling you, Goran the genius biologist, that if you really want to help, if you really want to atone for your fat, passive ignorance, then use all that brilliance of yours, and all that research you've tortured me for and figure out a way to fix that," the Doctor said, pointing to the steel table and its cold, inert burden.

Goran blinked at it fretfully. "Y-you want me to—?"

"Yes. If ever there was a scientist anywhere equipped to do it, it's you. I'm about to march through a base crawling with Daleks in order to save my life and the lives of all my other human friends _and_ save the universe in the process. This is the least you can do after all the trouble I'm going to." The Doctor stepped back, aimed his screwdriver at the tube and watched the locks spark. Goran cringed. He pulled open the tube. "Now get to work."


	26. Part 26

_Miranda continued to stare at the light, basking in its warmth. She smiled at her mother, feeling tears well in her eyes. She'd been so very lonely since her death. It couldn't have come at a worse time, just when Miranda was to be heading off to college. She'd had to do it alone, and almost hadn't made it. Would she be proud, Miranda wondered? What had Miranda's life amounted to since then? Her mother was the adventurous one, so full of life, always spontaneous and not always that sensible. She'd playfully ridiculed Miranda about her cautious nature many times, but when she'd been too ill from treatment to do more than lie in bed, it was Miranda's "cautiousness" that kept groceries in the house and the bills paid, all the while writing essays and taking placement exams for senior year._

_Miranda sensed the irony in that the same trait that got her through that difficult time had doomed her now. _

"_Come on," John urged, "She's waiting for you."_

_Miranda began to follow him towards the doors, towards the light and her mother's lovely face. It was irresistible. The priest had tried to console Miranda with talk of heaven, but now was the first time she'd ever been tempted to believe in it. _

_As she watched, she saw her mother turn away from her slightly, and saw someone else's face come into view. Miranda stopped, puzzled. It was her father. He and her mother were looking at each other adoringly, smiling and laughing just as Miranda remembered from her early childhood, when everything had been so fairy-tale perfect. Yes, there was her brother, too. He looked about twelve, when Miranda had thought he was the coolest, best big brother in the world. Before he became a callous, moody teenager that called her an annoying baby in front of his friends. Before their dad up and left one day, never to return. _

_But why was she seeing her father and brother? They weren't dead. Something was wrong with all this. _

"_Miranda, are you coming?" John asked, sounding slightly exasperated with her. _

_Miranda looked at the bright light, then at John, and something in his eyes and the poise of his body made her listen to the gnawing unease in her belly. She dropped his hand and stepped back. "No." _

"_I know this is frightening for you, but you have to trust me," John insisted. _

"_Why am I seeing my father and brother?" Miranda demanded. _

"_Because they're your loved ones."_

"_They're not dead. If that light is heaven or whatever, then what are they doing there?"_

_John sighed with obvious exasperation. "The afterlife is timeless. Everyone's there at once."_

_Miranda felt a panicky urge to run. "I don't believe you, John." _

"_So what are you going to do, just stay here?_

"_What if I do?" Miranda countered obstinately. _

"_Fine!" John tossed up his hands, "I tried! I didn't think it was possible for someone to fail at dying, but seeing as it's you, I'm hardly surprised."_

_His tone was spiteful, but now it just made Miranda more determined to refuse him. She recognized him now, and continued backing away, towards the console. It wasn't John, and she was not going to be his victim again. "You manipulated my feelings before, but now I'm on to you, buster! I'm not doing a damn thing you say."_

_John suddenly pulled a gun on her. "Oh yes, you will!"_

"_What good is that going to do you," she sneered, "if I'm already dead?"_

_The thing that looked like John smiled creepily at her and began to advance. "This is hardly the time to be developing a backbone, Miranda. I have abilities you can't even begin to imagine. Physical death is no obstacle to me. When that husk of a boy fell, and you took his hand, it made a lovely little bridge for me to pass from his mind to yours. And in your presently weakened state, I have the opportunity to live again. That's not your real body, nor is this the real TARDIS. You think this is an actual gun?" He nodded towards the open doors and the swirling vortex. " I recommend you cross into the light of your own volition. It will be far less traumatic a death that way."_

_Miranda watched him inch towards her, his finger twitching on the trigger. She didn't doubt that he'd do it. He was desperate and evil and, she was convinced, not remotely human. And it was clear by the scorn on his face that he expected her to comply as quickly now as she had then. _

_And therein was his weakness. He was right; this wasn't the TARDIS. This was her own mind, Miranda was sure of it. He was on her turf, now. Which meant unequivocally that the real power was hers. And this time, she was determined to use it. _

"_That's a nice gun," Miranda said calmly, reaching slowly behind the time rotor. "But mine's bigger," she added, swiftly pulling out the huge gun she'd decided to put on the console and turning it on John. "Step into the light, John," she ordered with a sarcastic flourish._

_He grit his teeth angrily. "I told you, my name is not 'John!' I am the Master—!"_

"_Not of me!" Miranda cried furiously, pulling her trigger. His chest exploded in a red cloud and his gun clattered to the floor as he flew back from the impact. Suddenly the whole room shuddered and tilted and John kept going, sailing out the TARDIS doors, into the swirling vortex beyond, his scream lost in the loud rushing sound of the vortex consuming its victim. _

_Miranda grabbed onto the console and rode it out, watching the vortex pulsate and begin to collapse in on itself, sucking a mighty wind past her ears. The vortex grew louder and louder as it shrank, until it was a mighty roar emanating from a tiny speck of intense light. And then it was gone. The TARDIS doors slammed close, and suddenly Miranda was plunged into a shockingly loud silence. _

_For a long moment, everything was completely still and silent, including Miranda. _

_Then she heard a loud CRACK!_

_Miranda yelped in surprise. Then she heard another CRACK! coming from a different part of the room. Then, like a stressed sheet of ice, she heard the cracks begin to multiply. Then she saw them. They snaked over every wall, into the floor, and towards her, up the console. Intense light shone through them as they began to widen, and whole sections of wall began to crumble away, letting in blindingly bright rays of light. Miranda frantically sought somewhere to shield herself, but the floor beneath her feet began to give way, and before she quite realized it, she was falling through, into the dazzling brilliance of the light all around her._


	27. Part 27

Miranda screamed and jerked awake. The light burned her eyes, the air burned her throat, and she was suddenly so very cold that it literally felt like her bones had turned to ice. She realized she wasn't falling anymore, either.

"Paws of the sky, knock me over! Miranda? Miranda, can you hear me?"

Yes, she could. The voice dribbled into her ears as though through layer upon layer of cotton, but she heard it. "C-cold," was all she could croak through her burning throat, her eyes still squeezed shut against the terrible light.

Seconds later, something large, soft and heavy fell on top of her. She startled badly and got a bad dose of vertigo. The soft, heavy thing moved over her and immediately began to infuse her frigid limbs with heat. It registered in Miranda's addled mind that it must be a blanket. She started to shiver violently.

"Bright," she croaked again. Mercifully, the piercing shine dimmed in response, and Miranda could unclench her brows.

"Is that better?" the cottony voice asked.

Miranda nodded.

"Can you open your eyes?"

Miranda thought about it, and nodded. It was surprisingly difficult to open her eyes. Her eyelids felt stuck shut, and when she finally got them up, her vision was completely blurred. She blinked forcefully to clear her sight, but without success.

"Here."

Miranda was unprepared for the moist cloth that was suddenly pressed over her eyes, but the warm moisture was quite refreshing, and when it was taken away, she could mostly see again. She saw a furry, rat-like face peering down at her with wrinkle-bound, but startled-looking eyes.

"Goran," she wheezed. Then she coughed. "Throat…dry."

The little lab coated rat-man shuffled over to a steel cart of supplies that included a pitcher of water and a glass. Miranda took advantage of the momentary lull to notice that she was lying on an examination table and had a tube plugged directly into a port on her chest. The tube glowed with a vaguely golden light, as did the contents of the IV bag it was attached to alongside the table. She also saw that she must have pulled loose several other leads when she woke up, which now lay scattered and dangling from the bank of machinery behind her.

Miranda felt terribly groggy, but judged it safe enough to sit up in order to grab the blanket and pull it up tighter. As soon as she tried to move, she fell back painfully. "Agh!"

"What's wrong?" Goran demanded fretfully, back with the glass of water, complete with a straw. He held it so Miranda could sip, and as soon as the cool liquid touched her parched tongue, it was all she could do not to empty the glass in one go, she was so thirsty. The cold water did nothing to warm her up, however, and she continued to shiver.

Miranda tried to sit up again, moving more carefully this time, and actually managed it, despite her every muscle screaming in protest. "Good God, I'm sore," she complained.

"Cor blimey!" an unfamiliar female voice suddenly exclaimed.

Miranda stared blankly at the young woman in black who approached from the other side of the room. Miranda's vision was still slightly blurred. She realized her glasses were missing.

"You actually did it! She's alive!" the young woman in black exclaimed again, shaking her head in awe. "Too bad the Professor couldn't see this!"

"…Hello," Miranda addressed her cautiously. She didn't have a clue what was going on anymore.

"Oh, yeah, sorry! Name's Ace," the young woman stuck a hand out for Miranda to shake.

"Where'd you come from? How'd you get here?" Miranda asked, taking her hand. Her own fingers felt very stiff.

"I came with the Doctor."

"Another one?"

"I know, right?" Ace smirked, launching into an animated rundown of her arrival.

Miranda only half listened, taking in Ace from her French braid and patch-covered coat down to her slender, black pants. She looked relatively contemporary, but a bit retro. Slightly 80's, if Miranda had to guess.

"You can make friends later, please!" Goran soon interrupted, nudging Ace aside to make an adjustment to the IV. He turned and began to accost Miranda with some kind of hand-held scanning device.

"So I was shot by that thing, the Dalek?" Miranda asked.

"So your Doctor said."

"He came back for me?"

"For your corpse, yes," Goran answered absently, focusing on his scanning device. "Remarkable! The speed of cellular repair is amazing! It's not only undoing the damage of the Dalek ray but all of the adverse effects of this time dimension, as well!" Goran chuckled to himself. "I should have rendered it a tonic ages ago."

"What? My _corpse_?" Miranda repeated disbelievingly. She was feeling better by the moment, but the situation seemed only to be getting stranger.

"It's true," Ace agreed, "You were stone dead. We all saw it."

"Who's 'all'?" Miranda demanded.

"Everyone. All the Doctors and Kamelion. Though I didn't know you were actually dead until after they'd all gone."

"Gone where? What'd I miss?!" Miranda wondered dizzily.

"Well, my Doctor and the one with the long hair are off to find the TARDIS. The loony one with the scarf is Dalek hunting with the guy in the leather jacket, and the other two in the rummy outfits are supposed to be finding the Dalek thing that brought us all here. I got told to stay here, to help him bring you back," Ace explained quickly, pointing to Goran.

Miranda stared at Ace for a second, marvelling at the nonchalant way she'd just summarized everything. Clearly not new to all this, was Ace. Miranda's mood soured momentarily. It figured that as soon as she got knocked out of commission that things would finally start to happen!

Beginning to warm up, Miranda took off the blanket. "Okay, so they're all saving the day, and I've just been brought back to life? Is that the gist of it?"

"Yep."

"What about the androids?"

"Blown up," Ace shrugged.

"…Okay." Miranda looked down at the port in her chest, noticing that Goran had discreetly only unbuttoned her shirt halfway down to insert it. "I'm still kind of fuzzy on the whole 'brought me back'—"

Miranda stopped, feeling like her insides had suddenly begun to heat up.

"Miranda? What's the matter?" Goran asked.

Miranda couldn't answer, feeling the heat spread through her limbs and build behind her eyes. She felt shaky and very, very strange. She curled up on the tabletop, welcoming the cool touch of the steel against her heated skin. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold back the swell of hot energy behind her eyes; she was afraid it might pop her eyes right out of their sockets.

Then she leaned over the side and retched a stream of golden, glowing fire that hit the floor soundlessly and dissipated back into the air like a cloud of smoke, feeling the unbearable heat bleed from her body.

"Okay then, I think you've had enough of it," Goran commented, helping Miranda roll onto her back and instructing Ace to hold her down.

Miranda only heard him vaguely. There was a rushing in her ears and she felt giddy. When she felt Goran disconnect the IV and take out the port in her chest, she giggled. Looking down, she watched in amazement as the small wound left behind sealed itself with another golden puff before Goran could patch it. "Whoa, cool," she remarked.

"Oy, Goran, what was that glowy stuff?" Ace asked.

"Time Lord essence, bonded to bits of Miranda's DNA and dissolved in a few pints of saline. I didn't expect it to work, I was trying things," he confessed, appearing dazed.

Miranda couldn't believe it. Her time with the Doctor had been peppered with some of the best, strangest and most dangerous experiences of her life. And a short while ago, her life had ended because of him. "So I really was dead?" Miranda asked, thinking back to her recent dream. Or was it?

"Dead, rigoured, and starting to decay, actually. That's why I didn't think it'd work. I was sure that Doctor of yours was off his head. I was just so worried he'd do something nasty to me if I tried to talk sense into him that I ignored my own and went on with it." Goran said. "I can't believe these results! You've been completely—"

"Reborn," Miranda cut him off quietly, awed by it all. She felt like it. The lab around her, even with its monotone greys and blacks, looked more vivid. Every wrinkle and stain on Goran's tired lab coat appeared sharp and intricate, every patch on Ace's black coat stood out brightly. The gentle hum of the air vents had a new resonance to it, and there was a lightness in Miranda's mind and heart that she'd never known before, as if all those years of worry, regret and uselessness had been filling her up with dead weight and had now been suddenly and thoroughly purged. She could feel her heart pounding vigorously in her chest and ears, and each breath she took had a purpose.

She thought back to that dream of John, and though the memory was there, it already felt faded and unreal, the sense of failure and powerlessness was rapidly losing context. Had that shrinking violet really been her? Good Lord, how was the Doctor able to tolerate her for so long?


	28. Part 28

Miranda saw Goran, still standing there, shaking his head and marvelling at her. Miranda grinned, impulsively reached out and grabbed the little rodent-man in a joyous hug. "Thank you for being senseless, Goran! Thank you, thank you, _thank you!"_

"Oh—! Ah, y-yes, you're welcome," Goran spluttered, hurriedly pulling free of her grasp. "Er, Ace, be a dear and put that tray of instruments back where you got them from, please."

Ace rolled her eyes indignantly but slouched off to comply.

Miranda realized what she'd done and laughed self-consciously. "Sorry! I'm just…you brought me back to life, Goran! You! That's amazing! I can't quite get my brain around it, it's that incredible. And you had me feeling sorry for you!" she chided him gently, hopping off the table.

Goran stepped back warily, scanning her again. "Er, what?"

"The frantic, pitiful way you got me out of here in that android suit had me thinking you were some helpless little sidekick or something. You see what you're capable of?" Miranda nudged him playfully. "You're a lot braver than you let on." Miranda suddenly stopped, clamping a hand over her own mouth. "Holy cow, I'm sounding just like the Doctor."

Goran chortled uncomfortably. "Indeed! A temporary side effect of the essence. I think it's trying to imprint him on you! But don't worry; this stuff has a short life. You should be back to normal soon."

"Good. Even so, I'm right about you, aren't I? Underneath all that quaking grey fur, there's someone who still cares about doing the right thing. Your bosses haven't trampled it out of you completely."

Goran adjusted his scanner busily and made a few noncommittal noises.

"Aw, come on, admit it! You and me, we're new creatures right now. Timid Miranda and Downtrodden Goran are gone!"

Goran continued to move away from her, focusing on his gadget. "I—I suggest you relax until the process fully—"

"Oh, okay, I get it, you're being modest," Miranda supposed.

"N-no, that's not…"

"Don't back-pedal now, you're helping me, and now helping the Doctor. You're onto a breakthrough!" Miranda pressed good-naturedly, reaching to poke the little furry scientist in the arm.

Goran unexpectedly turned on her and swatted her hand away. "No, I'm not!" he snapped angrily, "You, I was willing to help because you were innocent collateral in my bosses' plan, but the Doctors are my security. With them escaped, my bosses will kill them and then they'll kill me for letting them escape, so I activated the tertiary defence system once they'd all gone."

Miranda's stomach plunged through the floor as she digested his confession. "You did _what? _What tertiary system? What does it do?"

Goran stared at her in furtive intervals, wringing his paws.

"What does it do?" Miranda repeated urgently, advancing a step.

Goran winced. "I didn't know exactly who my bosses were, but I knew the basic arrangements. I've had quite a bit of time to poke around in my limited way. Beyond this lab are rooms and rooms full of incubation chambers, and this system was set up so that if the main control room of my masters were ever attacked directly, all of those incubation chambers would receive the command to rapidly mature and armour the occupant. My masters are warriors from the womb, and with one signal, this entire base can be overflowing with them." He straightened a little, speaking a little more boldly. "The Doctors would be insane to resist. By my letting them succeed in their goal, they'll only be ensuring their permanent captivity, or permanent demise."

Miranda once more found herself staring at the little alien in horror. So much for "new" Miranda, she'd just made the same stupid mistake again by trusting Goran. When was she going to stop being so gullible? _Never trust a rat. _

"You furry little _git!"_ Ace proclaimed, having wandered back into earshot. She began to lower her pack to the ground and started for him.

"Hey!" Miranda cried sharply.

Ace grabbed the diminutive scientist anyway, clearly meaning to do him harm. "Just you turn it off, then!"

"I can't!" Goran squeaked.

Ace put him in a headlock. "How 'bout now?"

"Ace, cool it, that's not helping!" Miranda ordered again, eager to keep the situation from getting out of hand.

Reluctantly, Ace loosened her hold on Goran.

Miranda hardened her face and glared at him. "How could you do something like that? If the Doctors succeeded, don't you realize we would've gotten you out of here, too?"

"They can't succeed! That's the whole point!" Goran wailed. "I spent ages trying to resist my bosses, but they're too powerful. They get into your head and you realize that there's no way out. If you disobey, you die. In the end, survival is all you've got left." He slumped in Ace's grasp, turning his pale, aged eyes on Miranda. She could see the torment there. "It's all I have. It's all _they _have."

Miranda turned her head away from him, refusing to be lured into his emotionalism. She had to do something. She thought quickly and determinedly with her new, un-muddied brain. "Ace, you said my Doctor was the one going to find the Daleks, right?"

"The one in the leather jacket and the scarf one. They took cans of my nitro."

"Your what?" Miranda asked.

"A crude explosive," Goran supplied.

"It'd put a hole in you well enough," Ace retorted.

Miranda's mind raced. The control centre had to be pretty close to the time corridor controls; the Daleks had been all over them in seconds. "Goran, is there a comm. system we can use to call to them and warn them?"

Ace tightened her grip on Goran. "No," he answered.

Then there was only one thing left to do. "All right, I'll have to go after him and stop him before he ka-booms the room," Miranda decided.

"I'll come with you," Ace offered.

"Okay—wait! —No, you should stay here, keep an eye on Mr. Tertiary Defence System."

"But—!"

"Think about it," Miranda cut in quickly, her mind racing faster than her mouth could follow, "I know these hallways better than you, and you're obviously used to threatening people. Plus, if those Dalek things come this way, you can fend them off with that stuff you have—whatcha call it?"

"Nitro nine."

"Yeah. You didn't give it all away?"

"I got some."

"Good. Plus, if there's one thing I know I can do, it's give the Doctor hell about blowing stuff up. Scary how often that's his solution to things," Miranda added, making for the door.

Ace frowned. "Doesn't sound much like the Doctor to me."

Miranda paused, heartened. She shrugged. "Maybe he mellows by your time."


	29. Part 29

"According to Kamelion, the TARDIS should be in a room just around that corner. And with the Doctor having made a nuisance of himself to the Daleks, it's probably guarded by now," the Eighth Doctor mused, crouching against the wall a safe distance down the intersecting corridor.

"Undoubtedly," the Seventh Doctor agreed in distracted tones, crouching behind the Eighth, and fishing in his pockets for a third ball to join the two he'd been idly trying to juggle.

The Eighth Doctor scowled lightly at him, uncertain if his younger version was actually clowning around, or really had a secret, clever reason for the juggling. Thinking back on what he'd been like then, the Eighth found himself unable to rule out either option. "All right, with the androids gone, the guards will have to be the Daleks themselves. Question is, how many are there, where is it out there, and how do we find out without getting exterminated in the process?" he murmured thoughtfully. Noticing his predecessor's question mark umbrella, he developed a plan and felt in his pocket for a mirror. "Let me see your um—"

He stopped mid-sentence as the Seventh Doctor, armed with three juggling balls, stood up, stepped around him and began casually marching towards the intersection, performing a simple, three-ball cascade. The Eighth Doctor watched in dumb dismay as his other self unexpectedly dropped his blue ball. The Seventh Doctor watched it fall calmly, and lifted a toe in time to make the blue ball bounce off the tip of his saddle shoe and go sailing down the corridor towards the ominous intersection.

The ball bounced, rolled, and suddenly exploded as two Dalek laser beams—one from the left and one from the right—simultaneously impacted the innocuous blue sphere. The Seventh Doctor caught his two remaining props and flattened himself against the wall. The Eighth Doctor flinched. Seven looked at him and silently held up two fingers.

Eight rolled his eyes and crept over to join him. "What are you doing?!" he snapped as quietly as possible.

"VECTOR-COMPUTED! INVESTIGATE!" a Dalek screeched.

"IN-VES-TI-GATE!" a second Dalek agreed.

The two Doctors stood still as the unmistakable sound of two Daleks on the move neared the intersection. "One for each of us," Eight muttered darkly, staring at his younger self in thinly disguised, angry confusion.

Seven just held a finger up to his lips. "Ready the nitro," he said, seemingly more concerned with the comparative size and balance of his two remaining juggling balls than the menace about to bear down on them.

"You think?!" Eight snapped, fumbling in his frock coat for the canister. Knowing his other incarnation so well, Eight had to believe his apparent act of suicidal insanity was in fact part of a cunning plan. However, since he wasn't that incarnation any longer, Eight couldn't quite tell what that plan was. He produced the canister of explosive in time to see the Seventh Doctor select his yellow ball to meet the Daleks next.

"OBJECT-APPROACHING!" one of the as-yet invisible Daleks proclaimed. A second later, BRZZAP! The yellow ball was transformed into a yellow puff of dust in the same manner as the blue ball had been.

"Trigger happy," the Eighth Doctor remarked, finger poised to activate the fuse.

Seven nodded, regarded his remaining red ball in a solemn goodbye, and then sent it bouncing after its fellows. From either side of the intersection, the pointed bottom rim of a Dalek began to glide into view. The red ball arched up between them and was similarly annihilated. Seven held up his thumb and closed one eye. "And excellent marksmen. Ready?"

Eight stood up with the can. He was starting to get the idea. "Follow the bouncing ball!" He watched with twitchy arm muscles as the Daleks slid into view. They slowly turned, side by side, to face the Doctors.

"Now," Seven said.

Eight activated the fuse and lobbed the can directly at the pair of Daleks. The Doctors ducked. The Daleks fired, and with a loud, reverberating boom, the corridor was showered in metal shards, twisted bits of polymer and thick coils of black, greasy smoke. The smooth walls of the corridor did nothing to muffle the noise, bouncing the sound around the Doctor's ears, amplifying the horrific screams…

…Of silence?

The Eighth Doctor stood up first. As much as he loathed them, Daleks were alive, and the screech of living beings in torment was a sound that Daleks were quite prone to making and that the Doctor would never get deaf to. But this time, there were no screams. He tried to peer into the thick smoke, but it was too opaque to see anything. Perhaps the explosion was merely a very efficient one, and the creatures had had no time to scream? The Eighth Doctor took off his coat and used it to clear the air, warily approaching the smoldering remains of the two Daleks.

"But by far, my favourite characteristic of Daleks is how very gullible they can be," the Seventh Doctor announced proudly. "Simple behavioural conditioning!" He slipped his hands into his pockets with satisfaction. He frowned, and pulled out a green juggling ball. He eyed it reproachfully. "Coward," he said, _tsking_ at the ball before slipping it back into his pocket. "Anyway, problem solved," he said to the Eighth Doctor's back.

Eight waved away clouds of acrid atmosphere, kneeling by the Dalek husks to get a closer look. "Yes, nicely done, Doctor. Though next time I would prefer to know what your plan is _before_ you lure the homicidal aliens after me," he remarked derisively.

"Don't enjoy being a pawn in your own game, eh?" Seven said, approaching.

Eight barely heard him, reaching inside the ravaged Dalek to confirm what his unreliable eyes seemed to be showing him—or rather, _not _showing him. "If it is a game," he intoned darkly, "then this must someone's idea of a joke."

Seven leaned over his shoulder and looked inside the Dalek. The Eighth Doctor looked up at him, and Seven met his gaze in agreement. "I can't say I care for their sense of humour," Seven remarked dryly. He tapped his chin with the handle of his umbrella thoughtfully.

"We need a way to get word to our other selves," Eight said. "It could be we're in over our heads."

"In which case, we need every available advantage," Seven agreed, stepping around the wreckage, peering both ways down the corridor, and crossing to the door the Daleks had been guarding.

Eight understood what he meant and kept his position behind the Dalek casings as Seven pressed flat against the wall beside the door, reached across and quickly triggered the opening mechanism. The door slid open, and the Eighth Doctor breathed a sigh of relief at the row of blue boxes visible within. There was no one—and nothing—else inside. Eight stood up, crept to the door and slipped inside the storeroom, confirming his assessment.

Seven followed him inside, closing the door. He pulled his ankh-shaped TARDIS key out of his pocket. "Let's get started."

Eight remembered with some amusement that he'd had the lock changed since his seventh life. Producing his own silver, Yale key, he turned to his predecessor. "So, your TARDIS or mine?"


	30. Part 30

By the Doctor's estimation, he was now on the other side of the time corridor control room from where he and Miranda had first encountered the Daleks. There had been no guarantee that the time corridor control room wasn't up against a wall, and coupled with the fact that Goran's lab seemed to contain schematics of no more than the laboratory itself, this had been a definite gamble. The Doctor had admitted to himself that this "Dalek hunting" idea of his had clearly been more a stab in the dark than usual.

What was currently cooking his brains, however, was the total lack of Daleks he had encountered thus far in his wanderings. After that messy introduction, he'd been quite certain the place would be crawling by now, or at the very least, there would have been a consistent, probably annoying alarm going off. But instead it was all very eerily quiet. And Dalek-less. Under the circumstances, he would have preferred the alarm and chaos of Daleks on patrol. He was used to that. He'd have been ready for it. Instead, he'd had nothing to break his concentration but the worried pounding of his hearts and it was giving him a bad case of nerves.

"Aha!" the Fourth Doctor suddenly proclaimed loudly in his ear.

The Doctor jumped. "What!?" he shrieked entirely inappropriately, hearts galloping.

"It's an empty corridor!" the Fourth Doctor exclaimed happily. "Just when I was beginning to think this place had run out of them, right here's another one!"

The Doctor glared. Of all the versions of himself, _why_ had he chosen Barmy Bug-Eyes? "When you have something _useful_ to say—"

"For heaven's sake, calm down! You'll do us no good at all wound up so tight like that. It's absolutely vital you keep your wits about you in a situation like this. These are Daleks we're talking about, after all."

"I know. Don't you think I know? I carried Miranda's corpse all the way back to the lab, Doctor. You have no idea the things I've—I bloody well know all I need to about Daleks!"

Four blinked, startled by his outburst. The Doctor drew a stabilising breath and turned away from him. He hadn't meant to snap like that, but his other self's casually dismissive tone was just too much to tolerate right now. Even though the Doctor suspected it was merely intended to help him settle his frayed nerves. It was far, far too late for that.

"Logically then, the Daleks command centre must be behind one of the doors in this corridor," Four said, politely changing the subject.

The Doctor was in agreement, and silently counted. Three doors on each side. "Which one? These Daleks don't seem to be much for labelling things," he said, as much to himself as to his other self. "And why isn't it being guarded?"

"They are as susceptible to this unfriendly temporal dimension as we are, and have been here longer than any of us. Perhaps they simply lack the vigour to mount a prolonged defence," Four rumbled, evidently thinking aloud, also.

The Doctor shook his head with barely a moment's consideration. "No. Given all the other precautions they've taken, I doubt they'd have backed themselves into a corner like that. The androids are evidence that they're conserving their own energy, but the day I meet the Dalek with no strength to try and kill me at all…."

Just then, the second door on the left calmly _whooshed_ open. The Doctor and his prior self were quick to duck around the corner and hide behind the intersecting wall. The Doctor pulled out a mirror and held it out at an angle to see what had opened the door. He saw the reflection of a Dalek quietly glide out, turn away from them and glide down the corridor, completely ignorant of their existence, it seemed. He stared at the mirror until the Dalek pivoted again, and amazingly, glided out of sight down another corridor some distance down the hallway. The door _whooshed_ close.

"Wonder where he was off to, eh?" Four remarked.

With any luck, the Fifth and Sixth Doctors should be sorting out a way into the time corridor controls at this very moment, the Doctor realized. Here was hoping they had better luck at it than he'd had.

Confident that no more Daleks were on the move, the Doctor pocketed his mirror and stepped back into the corridor. "Well, seems we've got at least one of our questions answered. I'll bet the contents of all my pockets the command centre is the second door on the left."

The Doctor hesitated, and then stopped.

"Which means all we've got to do is get inside and blow it up," Four added helpfully before he too, drew up to the Doctor and stopped, brow furrowed. "Ah."

The Doctor turned to him, trying not to be too overtly hopeful. "Er, ah, any helpful ideas on how we might actually _do_ that?"

Four was looking more wide-eyed than usual, toying with the ragged end of his scarf. "Well, doubtless it involves some permutation of the doors being opened, the nitro being wired up and then detonated, and our escaping with all our respective bits and pieces intact. As for specifics, however…do feel free to contribute."

The Doctor took to chewing his knuckles. It didn't help him think, but it did stop him from standing there like a complete boob. He only needed a moment of internal browbeating before his gears began to click once more. "Have you still got that cricket ball?" he asked finally.

Four dug around in his maze of pockets and miraculously managed to produce said item, the covering torn and flapping in a few places, but otherwise still air-worthy. "It is a remarkably useful thing to have, come to think. Even when it was sadly blown up back on Nerva—" he stopped, turning his eyeballs to regard the Doctor, who was handling his canister of Nitro Nine with a renewed sense of purpose.

The Doctor caught his gaze and smiled slowly, devilishly. "What do you think?"

"We open the door, I lob this high and in the fraction of a second that they're distracted, you're going to toss in the explosive and hope they all get blown to itsy bits while we cower safely outside the door?"

"More or less. What do you think?"

"I think it's ludicrous." A big, toothy grin spread across Four's drooping features. "Let's do it."

"Fantastic."

"HALT!"

Knives of dread shot through every one of the Doctor's nerves as the mechanized command rent the air behind him. He turned, his stomach now possessing the gravitational field of a small planet. _Damn and damn_. It was the Dalek they'd observed leaving just a few minutes ago. It had circled round on them. Now it was bearing down on them the way they'd just come, its gun aimed squarely. The Doctor had never even considered that it might do that.

"YOU-ARE-OUR-PRISONERS! SURRENDER-AT-ONCE!" the Dalek shrieked with an audible air of victory.

The Doctor looked at his other self. Four stared back at him helplessly, and raised his arms. The Doctor, fuming and kicking himself, saw no immediate alternative and slowly did the same.


	31. Part 31

"YOU-WILL-ACCOMPANY-ME-BACK-TO-THE-HOLDING-CELL," the Dalek instructed calmly, flicking the barrel of its ray gun from one Doctor to the other.

Mind racing, the Doctor felt a nudge from his associate. "I should do what he says, if you were me," the Fourth Doctor murmured, quickly crossing the intersection to stand beside the Dalek. He looked back at the Doctor and flicked his eyebrows urgently. "_Protest! Argue with it!_"

The Doctor spared a fraction of a second to indulge in some sincere puzzlement. Argue with an armed, trigger-happy Dalek? Then it hit him: why not? The Dalek was hardly going to shoot him, now was it? The Doctor squared off opposite the Dalek, trusting his other self would make good on his bizarre instruction.

"What if I don't?" the Doctor asked the Dalek.

"YOU-WILL-OBEY!" the Dalek barked.

"But supposing I don't? Supposing I just…" the Doctor began to take a few steps back, "…walk away?"

"HALT!"

"Or what?" the Doctor asked, backing up another step, "You'll _exterminate_ me?"

The Dalek hesitated.

"Come on, say it! Say your line."

The Dalek hesitated.

"What is it, Dalek? Thal got your tongue?"

"BE-SILENT!" the Dalek finally screeched.

"No," the Doctor answered simply. Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware of that the Fourth Doctor was fiddling with something in his coat behind the Dalek. "I'm being insubordinate and uncooperative, and all you're going to do is shout at me?"

The Dalek appeared flustered.

The Doctor decided to give the knife a little twist. "How pathetic! You know how many of your kind would have given up their plungers to be in the situation you're in right now? Just think, here you are, with your mortal enemy in your sights, and you can't do it. You can't kill me. You're a disgrace to the Dalek race!"

"YOU-ARE-NECESSARY-T0-THE-DALEK-PLAN! AFTER-YOU-HAVE-SERVED-YOUR-FUNCTION-YOU-WILL-BE-EXTERMINATED!" the Dalek screamed.

The Doctor glanced at Scarf, who was still fumbling with his coat. He shot the Doctor a brief, crazed look. "_A few moments longer! Keep it up!_"

The Doctor grit his teeth. "Listen to yourself! 'Necessary to the Dalek plan'? Who am I, Dalek? Who am I?"

"YOU-ARE-THE-DOCTOR."

"And what else? What else!"

"…YOU-ARE-AN-ENEMY-OF-THE-DALEKS."

"What do Daleks do their enemies? Come on, you know that one!"

"DALEKS…EXTERMINATE…THEIR-ENEMIES."

_Like pulling teeth. _"That's right! So if Daleks exterminate their enemies, and I'm your enemy, then you have to exterminate me."

The Dalek's aim wavered, as if confused. "BUT-YOU-ARE-NECESSARY—"

"Then I guess you're not a Dalek," the Doctor spat.

The Dalek stopped its fidgeting. It aimed all of its protuberances directly at the Doctor. "YES," it growled.

All of the sudden the Doctor was starting to get a little worried about the direction he'd chosen to take his argument.

---------------------------------------------

Miranda raced heedlessly down the series of blank corridors. Her legs turned corners and skidded through intersections with a speed and certainty probably more due to the Doctor's essence than her own level of fitness. She didn't care who or what saw her. She _had_ to stop the Doctor before he blew up that command centre and Goran's tertiary defence system kicked in, rendering them all royally screwed. She just had to trust that he'd actually listen to her instead of dismissing it as another of her scaredy-cat, "let's not get too involved" pleas. Those days were behind her. Miranda figured the fact that she'd come back to life in order to do it would give her some extra clout this time.

She heard him before she saw him, and practically fell over in her haste to stop.

"Dalek, who am I?" the Doctor's voice echoed powerfully down an intersecting corridor.

"YOU-ARE-THE-DOCTOR," a voice out of Miranda's nightmare reverberated back.

Cold, nauseating panic swept through Miranda's insides. She remembered how it felt. The bolt of plasma, so hot it flashed through her like boiling ice, the intense, paralysing pain so bad she just wanted to die, the sudden inrush of black nothingness, as if in response to her agonising, physical plea…

"YOU-ARE-AN-ENEMY-OF-THE-DALEKS," the demonic scream continued from someplace up ahead.

Miranda pulled herself out of visceral flashback and followed the voices at a measured jog. She tried to think. If the Doctor was one-on-one with that thing…either he'd already got into the command centre, or he was dealing with a sentry, maybe? Either way, this was not good.

Creeping up against the wall, Miranda slowed as a sight opened up ahead that make her choke. The Doctor stood as defiantly as she'd ever seen him, smack in the middle of the intersection, facing off with the metal monster, as if they were simply waiting for someone to yell, "draw!" Miranda stopped, her heart pounding like mad. No signs of an explosion, at least.

"DALEKS-EXTERMINATE-THEIR-ENEMIES," the robot pronounced slowly.

Miranda shivered. Never had she heard a more terrifying threat. But it was nothing compared to what the Doctor said in reply:

"That's right! So if Daleks exterminate their enemies, and I'm your enemy, then you have to exterminate me."

Miranda stared at him sharply. Was that a challenge, or a statement of fact? Observing the jagged, craggy lines of his forehead and stony set to his mouth, she could tell the volcano was definitely rumbling. Miranda tensed, waiting for the Doctor's plan to suddenly become obvious. He had to be bluffing. Yet, something inside her resonated with the look on his face, and Miranda was abruptly faced with the surreal possibility that maybe he wasn't.

The Dalek looked ready to fire, but didn't. "BUT-YOU-ARE-NECESSARY—"

"Then I guess you're not a Dalek," the Doctor spat, giving no sign that he was preparing to back down, or run away, or pull a gun or his screwdriver out of anywhere. Instead, his hands, which had been in a slowly decaying gesture of surrender, were now lifted slightly away from his sides, palms facing the Dalek, inviting it to strike.

Miranda felt the bottom drop out of her world. He meant it. She could see it all over him, etched even into the wrinkles and cracks of his worn leather jacket. He was beaten. He didn't want to fight anymore. She could sense the sadness coming off him in waves. Such desperate, lonely sadness and grief that it was all she could do to keep from being consumed by it, herself. It was not new. Now that she was aware of it, Miranda realized that it had already been there, just under the surface, from the first moment she'd ever met the Doctor. He was utterly stained with it, and all Miranda could conclude was that this alien machine parked opposite him must have been responsible for it in some way.

The Dalek answered the Doctor's insult with one chilling syllable: "YES."

Miranda knew what it was going to do. And what she had to do. She didn't think twice. She launched herself at the Doctor with everything she had. She heard the Dalek fire its gun. She collided with the Doctor and shoved him out of the way. The plasma bolt hit her mid-back. Every nerve ending in her body exploded with icy-hot agony. Her organs filled with it, her field of vision erupted in blinding white light and she was hardly aware of it when her body slammed onto the floor.

The pain came in ever-strengthening waves. She couldn't breath, couldn't move. The universe seemed as though it had shrunk to the confines of her body, because nothing else existed but the layer of torment enveloping every inch and pervading every cell of her body. She could feel them, the cells, trying to burst open, as if pain were something that could be spilled out like water or blood. And for the duration of that hideous little universe's existence, Miranda wanted to let them. God, she wanted to die, to pass on into that black nothingness like before. _Anything_ to escape this!

But then, beneath the searing hurt in her body, she felt a strange, warm tickle. She latched onto it like a drowning person to a piece of driftwood, and slowly, it grew in strength, shocking her with the rapidity with which it suddenly overwhelmed the pain. Miranda gasped as the warm tickle surged through her, building behind her eyes into a hot, buzzing crescendo that soon threatened to be as hideous to endure as the pain had. Then, it receded. She felt it all bleed out through her skin, the air shocking her with its coolness.

No, it wasn't the air, it was the floor that was so cold. Miranda's senses slowly recovered and though she felt too spent and too rubbery in the joints to get up, she noticed the air had a decidedly unpleasant chemical stench to it and that her ears were ringing. Opening her eyes, she discovered the reason for both. The Dalek had been blown up.


	32. Part 32

It was moments like these for which the Doctor was grateful he had such a supremely capable mind. Even so, the sudden appearance of Miranda, coupled with the Dalek deciding to shoot after all, and realizing that the human, very much alive, had inexplicably just got herself shot dead by a Dalek—_again_—was almost too much to handle.

Fortunately, no sooner did her cry of pain pierce his ears than he was momentarily deafened by the boom of the Dalek casing exploding, giving him a compelling reason to turn his horrified eyes from Miranda's crumpled body and duck from the spray of debris. Just as he recovered from the blast, he saw a flash of golden light and watched, to his immense surprise, as Miranda's body began to glow with suffuse yellow energy. It vaguely registered to him that the effect bore an eerie similarity to regeneration, and that thought alone was enough to make him forget entirely about the Dalek.

The Doctor knelt by Miranda's side and had to look away briefly as the glow out of her skin became too bright to stare at. It peaked and then rapidly faded, diffusing out of her in a vaporous puff of gold that traced tingling paths across the Doctor's own face and hands as he reached down, rolled her onto her back and felt for a pulse.

Miranda gasped loudly and twitched. Her eyes blinked open and flicked around in a dazed, startled expression before settling on him.

"Miranda?" the Doctor said, not quite able to believe this.

"Hi," Miranda responded, sounding equally incredulous. Then, "Oh, excuse me, sir. I'm looking for your son, the Doctor."

The Doctor hesitated. Was it brain damage? Oxygen deprivation? Amnesia?

Miranda suddenly giggled. "Kidding, Doc. But you look ancient. How long was I dead for?" She crinkled her nose. "What happened to the Dalek?"

The Doctor just stared at her, his nimble mind rapidly reaching its limits. Goran had actually done it. She was alive. But how…? The Doctor could only think of one way to handle this. He got angry.

"What the hell were you thinking, you stupid ape? Flinging yourself in front of an armed Dalek? Didn't you get enough of that the first time?" he spluttered furiously, having some minor difficulty getting his creaky knees to unbend so he stand over her and rant properly.

Miranda propped herself on her elbows, staring at him. "Hey, I just saved your life a minute ago, or did you forget that you're _mortal_ now?" she snapped back. "Heck of a time to start getting suicidal, Doc."

"Me? What do you call that little stunt of yours?"

"Don't change the subject!" Miranda growled in an unexpected show of nerve.

She started to get up, but suddenly cringed, a hand on her stomach, and leaned onto the wall. The Doctor reached for her arm to help her, but she waved him off angrily.

"For your information, Goran pumped me full of that essence stuff of yours. I wasn't planning to get hit again, but I figured if I did, I'd stand a better chance of surviving it than you would. It was starting to wear off, so I had to act fast," she explained, her voice sounding tight and pained.

The Doctor let his jaw fall open. Goran was far, far cleverer than he'd guessed. The Doctor knew that regenerative essence had some potential as an agent of biogenesis, but he'd never known it to be used successfully to this degree before.

"My essence?" he repeated softly, not sure how he felt about that. Essence was aptly named. It was sometimes a volatile mix of energy; containing stray emotions, personality traits, biological imprints, even trace memories sometimes. It was a bi-product, not intended for this sort of usage.

Miranda nodded, grimaced again and slowly sank down to sit on the floor. "Yeah, he DNA bonded it and stuff. I think it wore off a little too soon…got some pain…"

The Doctor crouched by her side again, pulling out his sonic screwdriver to check her over, concerned whether the stuff might be doing her more harm than good.

"Don't blow up the command centre," Miranda said suddenly, turning to look him in the eye.

"What?"

"Goran was trying to trap you. If you blow up the Dalek command centre, it'll send a signal to all the other incubating Daleks to attack. That's why I came after you."

The Doctor momentarily forgot about his diagnostic and digested this piece of intelligence. Of course. The Daleks weren't just trying to augment their existing comrades; they were trying to breed a whole new race of regenerating killers. It made sense. Then it struck him: it made too much sense. Daleks were not above using Time Lord technology when it suited their needs, but when it came to their own biological identity, would they really resort to patterning themselves after their mortal enemy just to gain a competitive advantage? That would seem to contravene the very nature of what it was to be Dalek.

"What?"

The Doctor glanced at Miranda, saw she was eyeing him quizzically and quickly recovered his composure. "And here I was, hoping you showed up just because you missed me."

"Ha, ha. Then I'm a glutton for punishment, too."

"I didn't ask you to jump in front of that Dalek!"

"I heard exactly what you asked it to do, Doctor," Miranda responded soberly, her tone demanding an explanation that wasn't rooted in sheer self-destruction.

Luckily, he had one. "Don't be stupid. If you'd had any sense, you'd have noticed that I was merely distracting it so Scarf over there could destroy it without being noticed. It was all according to plan."

"It fired at you."

"Only because _you_ jumped in the way and startled it! 'Look before you leap,' Miranda. Isn't that your speciality?"

Miranda crossed her arms and looked away briefly. "Didn't look like you were faking," she muttered softly.

The Doctor gripped the sonic screwdriver so hard that he accidentally sent it off. However, it gave him a welcome excuse to dodge the conversation and resume checking Miranda for injuries.

She couldn't know what she was saying. He didn't talk to her about that, and she'd never asked any probing questions, though there'd been times when he'd sensed that she'd wanted to. Like now. And there'd been plenty of times when what she'd just suggested would have been very, very close to the truth. She had no idea what it was like. None of them did. Nor could she know how much he wished he could go back to that state of simple ignorance.

He was even a little surprised at just how well he was still able to think and act. Perhaps it was another aspect of the dampening effects of this unusual temporal dimension. Everything was already about as surreal as it was possible to get, and the irony hadn't been lost on him that of all the versions of himself that the time corridor could have brought in, not a single one was from _his_ future. After all the damage done, did he even have one?

"Do you know, I think someone's having us on," the full, bass tones of Scarf cut in mildly.

The Doctor turned and saw Scarf circling the remains of the Dalek, poking at smoking bits inside the casing, his fingers protected by his scarf.

"What do you mean?" the Doctor asked.

Scarf looked up from the Dalek, regarding the Doctor and Miranda with his mercurial features set in surprised bemusement. "There's nothing in here," he announced simply.


	33. Part 33

Miranda's insides were not happy; it felt as though she'd suffered internal burns, and every time her heart beat, they seared afresh. But she wasn't going to let on. Miranda couldn't get past that look she'd seen on the Doctor's face moments ago. She always prided herself on respecting other peoples' privacy, but now she was starting to think that perhaps she'd let that go a bit too far with the Doctor. Though the powerful sense of loss she'd experienced in him had faded, she knew instinctively that she hadn't imagined it. There was a lot the Doctor had never told her. The last thing she wanted to do now was give the Doctor an excuse to avoid the issue again.

Unfortunately, the other Doctor didn't seem to share her concern. "It's empty," Scarf said, staring down into the destroyed Dalek.

"What do you mean, empty?" the Doctor barked, quickly elbowing Scarf out of the way to get a closer look. "That's impossible." He adjusted the sonic screwdriver and set upon the smoking husk in an inquisitive fury.

Scarf quickly did the same. "Do you see that?" he asked, indicating something within.

"See it? How could I miss it?"

Miranda sighed in exasperation, only to have her deep breath cut short by hot pain below her ribs.

"You realize what it means, of course," Scarf continued.

The Doctor stopped fiddling and regarded Scarf soberly. But he said nothing, and soon resumed his tinkering. "It's been completely retrofitted, you notice?"

"An excellent job, could do no better myself," Scarf agreed.

Miranda decided it was time to play Stupid Human again. "What is it?" she asked from the floor.

"In a word? Fake," the Doctor answered, consumed with the robot's internals.

Miranda's damaged insides twisted sympathetically. "How so?"

"It's not alive. There's no Dalek in here. Hasn't been for a long while."

"But you said _that_ was a Dalek."

"This, Miranda, is just a casing. Like an armoured wheelchair for the Dalek creature inside."

Creature? Miranda was surprised. She'd been so sure they were robots. "So you mean they're actually alien life forms?"

"Technically, yes," Scarf cut in dourly. "Daleks are monsters. Quite probably the most catastrophically evil race this universe has ever spawned," he went on, "Mutants, genetically engineered by their creator to remove every emotion but pure hate, and with only one motive: to annihilate anything and everything that is not Dalek."

Miranda stared at the smoking ruin. "Why?"

"To survive," the Doctor said. "You want to know what a Dalek is? The ultimate survivor, at any cost."

Miranda suppressed a shiver, chilled by the empty coldness in the Doctor's voice. "But this isn't the real thing?" She started to feel oddly disappointed. "You mean I got shot by an imitation Dalek? Should that make me feel better, or worse?"

"You should feel lucky. That gun was certainly the real thing. And the casing's authentic, probably scavenged. But there's no creature inside. So yeah, it's a fake. Of course it's fake. I should have realized it straight away," the Doctor reflected.

"How?"

"Because Daleks don't evolve. They only person they would ever allow to tamper with their DNA was their creator, and in the end even _he_ wasn't good enough for them. It's ludicrous to think that they would use their mortal enemy as a genetic template. Makes no sense."

"Well, they can't be too full of themselves if they're making Goran engineer them," Miranda commented.

"That's exactly the point! Daleks have always considered themselves to be physically perfect, completely superior life forms. They wouldn't behave in this way. This casing proves it. Whatever it may look like, it's not a real Dalek," Scarf said, taking his hand out of the Dalek to put out a smoking cinder on his scarf. Then he landed a soft kick to the rim. "It's a doppelganger Dalek, you might say."

"Either way, let's just be grateful there isn't a real Dalek in here, or else I couldn't do _this_!" the Doctor proclaimed, ripping out a large section of the Dalek's electronic guts. He fell backwards away from the shower of sparks, landing hard on his backside. He turned his sonic screwdriver onto the mass in his lap. "Ha! I knew it! Remote-control!"

"Is it, really?" Scarf asked, moving closer to examine the circuitry himself. "Incredible."

"Devious," the Doctor corrected him.

"Now to the 'why' and 'by whom' of it."

"I've got one or two theories about that, myself."

Miranda was having trouble thinking clearly through the obnoxiously consistent throbbing in her body, but was determined not to lose the edge. "Other Daleks," she suggested. "Goran mentioned incubation chambers. Maybe they were trying to fool us into thinking there were more of them than there really are."

"That's an ingenious idea, but you're wrong. Daleks are very efficient killers. Entire civilisations have fallen at the very mention of their name. They don't need numbers. Not to mention the lot of them are barking mad egoists. Even if they were hopelessly outnumbered they'd never resort to smoke and mirror stuff like this," Scarf said.

"No, I think somebody just wanted us to think these were Daleks. Like a bogeyman, designed to intimidate us in case we managed to infiltrate this place," the Doctor agreed, preoccupied with the stuff in his lap. He twisted a pair of wires together and winced at the fountain of sparks that shot out from it. Then, a series of little lights in the mass of technological entrails began blinking. The Doctor grinned like a loon and held it up for her to see. "And if I'm as clever as I think I am, I just may have sussed a way to find out who that somebody is."

"What did you do?"

"This casing was getting its orders from somewhere. Apply a bit of jiggery here, pokery there, and viola; its transceiver becomes a tracking device. Add the sonic screwdriver"—the Doctor propped said tool onto the top of the wire-coated box—"and now I can follow its signal to the source, find out who these mysterious puppeteers finally are."

The Doctor was hiding behind false cheer again. Miranda felt slightly nervous and decided immediately that he shouldn't go do it alone. "Sounds like a plan," she said, slowly endeavouring to get up. She was prepared for it to hurt, but did her best to pretend it didn't do. Apparently she was no better at hiding her true feelings than he was, however.

"Where do you think you're going?" the Doctor exclaimed, striding over to grab her arm and help her.

"I'm not letting you have all the fun by yourself," Miranda said bravely, leaning heavily on him. Wow, those Dalek beams were nasty things!

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Think again; you don't look good in green. Scarf, take Miranda back to the TARDIS."

"No, I'm o—"

"Don't argue, Miranda, you can't help me with this."

Scarf joined them and quite chivalrously put his arm around her for support, but Miranda was watching the Doctor too closely to pay much attention. The hand that clutched his new gadget fidgeted constantly, and the volcano behind his eyes was still glowing. He dropped her hand and patted her on the head. "Thanks for saving my life, now get."

"You sure about this…? I mean, I'll go back, but this guy—your, uh—Scarf?—could go along, be some backup for you—"

"Don't need any. I know what I'm doing, Miranda."

Yes. Just like when she leapt in front of the Dalek, Miranda sensed that the Doctor did indeed know _exactly_ what he was doing, and it scared her. With her newfound bravado, she really wanted to fight with him on it, make him take someone with him, _anything_ to prevent him from doing what she was afraid he was going to do. But even as she stood, she could feel her Dalek injury growing worse, and doubted that she would be able to make it back under her own power. Ultimately, she couldn't control the Doctor, either.

"Okay. But be careful. You're my ride home, remember?" she said, trying desperately to sound light-hearted. "And don't forget, the tertiary defence system—"

"I remember. Now get to the TARDIS. Go on."


	34. Part 34

"It's all so ignoble!" the Sixth Doctor sighed despairingly as he sat on the floor of the time corridor control room. "No epic battle, no clever trap…"

The Dalek guarding him flashed its headlights irritably. "YOU-WILL-BE-SILENT!"

"Yes! Now _there's_ a lovely idea!" the Fifth Doctor snapped, his shoulders bristling as he was forced to sit back-to-back with his loquacious successor.

"I may be compelled to sit here and to do nothing whilst I decay and dry up into eternal feeble-bodied-ness, but don't expect me to do it quietly!" Six protested sharply. "Can you imagine for a moment, Dalek, what it is to be doomed? _Doomed_ to permanent decrepitness? Moment by moment, feeling one's limbs wither and one's mind stretch thin and come apart under the weight of years? Can you _imagine_ a fate worse than that?"

"I can think of one," the Fifth Doctor murmured darkly, studying the ring of Daleks, most aiming more or less directly at the pair of them.

"YOU-WILL-CEASE-THIS-UNNECESSARY-COMMUNICATION!" another Dalek shrieked.

The Sixth Doctor ignored them both. "Difficult enough under normal circumstances, and to be a human, or a Dalek, where at least there's the certainty of death shortly afterward—"

Five cleared his throat pointedly. The Daleks that were not actively guarding the Doctors appeared to be trying to repair the damage the Ninth Doctor had done to the controls. Given how long they'd been forced to sit and wait on the floor, the Fifth Doctor figured they weren't having much luck at it, and time was short enough.

"But for a Time Lord, incapable of regenerating, as I am now…it could be _unending_. Eternal!" The Sixth Doctor sighed loudly. "Immortality mired within the mortal. But no death. Not for a very, very long time. And now to sit here, enfeebled as I am, forced to await my interminable and _useless _end at the business end of a Dalek ray gun! Oh, dear."

"Yes, all the more lamentable considering this was all _completely avoidable_," Five sniped.

"Oh, don't start that again!" Six complained, throwing his head back in a gesture of exasperation.

"Ow!" the Fifth Doctor exclaimed as their heads bonked.

"Sorry," the Sixth grumbled, rubbing the back of his head. He muttered, "Serves you right, though. Perhaps now you'll be able to remember a simple set of directions."

Five was as annoyed at his successor as he was at the cramp developing in his legs and back from who-knows-how-long of having to sit still on the hard floor. "I knew _exactly_ how we were supposed to get here. _You_ were the one who had it wrong!"

"Poppycock!"

"BE-SILENT!" the Dalek ordered again.

"If you were so sure about it, then why did we even bother with your quaint little guessing game which had us both so marvellously distracted outside while the Daleks surrounded us?" the Sixth Doctor continued heedlessly.

"Perhaps if you weren't so chatty, we'd never have forgotten in the first place."

"CHATTY?!" Six bellowed in umbrage.

Five winced, ears ringing. "Trying to compete with your coat, now?"

"My…? Now, that's just low."

"Sorry, I'm afraid my mind's been 'stretched a bit thin by the weight of years,'" Five quoted mockingly.

Six blustered inarticulately for a moment before rejoining with, "Well, so has your hairline!"

"ENOUGH!" one of the repair Daleks screeched loudly, rolling around the control console to address the two Doctors. Five and Six startled appropriately. "YOU-WILL-CEASE-TALKING-AND-ASSIST-US-IN-REPAIRING-THE-TIME-CORRIDOR-CONTROLS," it said.

"We will not," Six harrumphed.

"Why? Surely you should be competent enough for a simple patch job," Five agreed.

"YOU-WILL-REPAIR-THE-TARGETING-MECHANISM-TO-FUNCTION-AS-THE-OTHER-DOCTOR-MADE-IT-TO."

"Just so you can finish dragging me out of time and space to finish your sadistic genetic experiment? Not a chance," Six growled.

The Dalek pointed its gun at the Doctors, and all the other Daleks followed suit. "OBEY."

"Ah. Yes. A very compelling counter-argument," the Fifth Doctor gulped nervously.

"Erm, yes, point taken," Six agreed.

"PROCEED-TO-THE-TIME-CORRIDOR-CONTROLS," the master Dalek ordered stonily.

The two Doctors creaked and groaned their way from the floor to the open panels of singed and rewired circuitry, both quite stiff from their accumulated age and uncomfortable seats.

"'_So has your hairline'?" _the Fifth Doctor repeated incredulously with his eyebrows as he began to size up the job before them.

"_I haven't had my tea. And who knew they'd be so patient with us?" _Six communicated back.

A pair of Daleks rolled up behind them, guns aimed at a claustrophobic closeness. "REPAIR. OBEY."

The Doctors shared uneasy looks.

"_Regeneration is a fickle thing. Perhaps your bickering skills have just got a bit out of practice," _Five remarked once their heads were safely bowed over the damaged panel.

_"My plan worked, Doctor. We have direct access to the time corridor. You can resume your feckless, mild-mannered incongruity now."_

Amazing, the depth of annoyance that could be conveyed with a facial twitch. _"Yes, well done," _Five rolled his eyes as he did the same with his sleeves in preparation to start working. _"Though I feel I should point out that even if we can wire the time corridor to lock back onto our own unique temporal signatures without the Daleks noticing, your brilliant plan still lacks a way of reversing the corridor's direction to allow us to get back out again," _he needled.

Six began studying readouts from the console screen and frowned in concentration. _"Still working the details. And assuming our other selves made it to the TARDIS safely, no doubt they're doing the same."_

Five suppressed a pleased grin. _"Don't you love improvisation? Isn't this better than sitting around in the house all day?"_

The Sixth Doctor leaned over to check an adjacent readout and jumped as his backside accidentally rubbed against one of the Dalek gun barrels. He frowned at it, and the Dalek grudgingly inched back a little. He turned back to the Fifth Doctor. _"'Better' is not quite the word I would choose, given the circumstances."_

The Fifth Doctor just shrugged, marvelling, despite the Sixth Doctor's purposeful bemoaning of their sorry physical states, at just how much this dimension really had started to age their spirits, as well.


	35. Part 35

"I still say you should have stayed with him," Miranda insisted as she hobbled along with the old Doctor. It was still difficult for her to imagine that the Doctor she knew had ever been like him. Oddly, it was the personality differences between them she found most jarring, rather than the completely different physical appearances.

Scarf scoffed. "Well, of course! I have."

"I mean _with him_. Back there."

Scarf stopped short and stared at her indignantly. "I assure you, I never left. How could I? I'm the Doctor. If I'd left, then I wouldn't be the Doctor anymore, would I?" He started moving again.

Oh, that's right; this one was completely crazy. She'd almost forgotten. "I just don't trust what he's thinking of doing right now, that's all. I'm not sure where his voice of reason is."

"And what do you think he's going to do?"

Miranda was irked by the vaguely condescending tone of his voice. _That_ was familiar. "Do you know what the Daleks did to him?" she asked instead. "Did he tell you anything?"

"Of course he didn't! There are very strict rules about this sort of thing. A Time Lord isn't even supposed to meet himself by accident. Sharing knowledge about his own future could irrevocably alter—"

"—the timeline, the sun, the moon, the stars, your _teatime!_ I get it," Miranda cut him off irritably.

"It's very wasteful asking questions whose answers you already know, you know. Rassilon's doing it to me all the time; ha, ha!" Scarf chortled, tapping his battered hat with his free hand.

"Well, something isn't right here. I don't know why I'm so sure, if it was some kind of weird effect of having his essence and getting a little bit of his emotional residue on me or what, but I have a really bad feeling about him going off on his own to find these aliens."

She grabbed onto his scarf and forced him to stop and pay attention to her. Crazy or not, she had to make him understand. She remembered the grief and sadness that had welled up inside her when she'd watched the Doctor face off against the Dalek. Her heart was pounding as she made herself say it: "I don't think he's planning to make it back to the TARDIS."

Distressingly, Scarf didn't seem to think that was such an earth shattering revelation. "I rarely plan on anything, except for the fact that most of the time things won't go according to anyone's plan. Particularly for those who think they've got it all planned out to start with. Funny how _they_ never seem to realize that, though."

"I don't think you get what I'm saying. He's sending us away so he can go suicide himself!"

Scarf stared at her in utter bemusement. "Yes? And?"

Miranda was hopelessly frustrated. "And _that's bad!_"

"Well," he drawled deeply, "that's a fairly subjective and narrow perspective on it, don't you think?"

Miranda planted herself, sick with trying to get him to see reason. "_I_ think he needs my help. I've spent most of my time with him being a waste of space because I could never make up my mind to do anything, because all I could think about was, what if I had it wrong?" Miranda stopped and stared at him, not because she was necessarily done with her little speech, but because she was beginning to _really _feel ill. The last few bits of Doctor essence must have finally worn off. _No! Don't fall out, now! _she urged herself, trying to blink away her wooziness.

"Are you all right?" Scarf asked.

"My point is…" Miranda forced herself to continue. Her mind was getting very fuzzy. Damn, what was her point? "…the Doctor likes to blow things up." No, that wasn't it. Was it?

"Let's go to the TARDIS," Scarf suggested, taking her shoulders.

"Yeah. No! We need Ace," Miranda persisted. "If he's going to blow himself up, we need Ace. She's stuck with Goran. We should go get her." The corners of her vision were starting to dim. She felt very light headed. She felt Scarf's fingertip on her eyelids and didn't protest as he checked her eyes.

"Not a bad idea. The lab is closer than the TARDIS and you do look quite excessively green."

"Then we can help the Doctor…blow himself up…." Miranda completely lost track of what she was saying as the fuzzy darkness swallowed her up.

--------------------------------------------------

The Doctor's thoughts were dark as the door quietly whooshed open in front of him. He could hear Miranda and the Fourth Doctor shuffling away towards the TARDIS. Knowing now that the Dalek was a fake, he saw no harm in checking out the supposed control room on his own to get confirmation. As the door retracted and he stepped inside, he found himself standing in the midst of a collection of silent, dusty Daleks. They didn't move or speak, and a quick sweep with the sonic screwdriver proved that the place in fact was just a storage room full of empty Dalek casings. Now that he was alone, he took the opportunity to explore the room a little.

He paused to look at a fuse box of sorts on the wall and confirmed what Miranda had told him about Goran's defence system. The room was full of sensors that were wired into the base's electrical system in a very complicated way. Probably some kind of feedback loop. The back of the Doctor's neck prickled nervously. Even though they were inert, he could feel the eyestalks pointed at him. He left the fuse box alone and turned.

The casings were an interesting find; they ranged from nearly new to badly dinged and scarred. Some even appeared to have been assembled out of junk parts. A few had their domes off, and he could see that they were all wired up similarly to the one he'd just taken apart outside in the corridor. But all were empty and lifeless, their Dalekanium surfaces dulled and pitted from ancient, myriad abuses and the corrosive effects of this dimension. They were relics. Dead. But that came as no comfort to the Doctor. They were dead, but not gone. The Daleks would never be gone, so long as they were remembered. So long as the mere suggestion of their existence was enough to frighten others into obedience. And this was far more substantive evidence than he was comfortable with, as Miranda had—twice! (That strange little ape!)—discovered.

And all for the sake of...what? A little scare? An inventive, hands-off way to keep him from misbehaving? In that case, Cybermen would have done the trick just as well. Even a Yeti or two would have made him think twice. Why'd it have to be Daleks? Everything about the situation had pointed to Daleks. The time corridor, the transmat beam, it was all Dalek technology. And Miranda had even mentioned incubation chambers.

So, what looks like a Dalek, talks like a Dalek, lives like a Dalek, but isn't a Dalek? he wondered, resting his hand atop a nearby dome.

When his hand touched the casing, his skin began to tickle strangely. He took it off the Dalek, and the sensation stopped. Curious, he touched a single fingertip to the dome. The tingle returned. The Doctor slowly realized why and spread his palm against the cool metal, letting the tingle spread through his hand. He held it there, communing with what must surely be one of the last vestiges of his home. The tingle was caused by polarised Artron energy. The Dalek casing was completely irradiated with it. It would have taken a particularly catastrophic event to cause the bio energy of a Time Lord to be altered and absorbed in this way.

Realizing how much time he was wasting, the Doctor took his hand off of the casing and left the storage room, himself as empty and battered as the contents of the room he was leaving behind. He could feel his unused tin of Nitro Nine weighting his pocket as he moved on down the corridor, each step bringing him closer to an answer, closer to putting an end to this increasingly bizarre escapade.

He followed his screwdriver's lead through the maze of corridors, barely paying attention to the path he was on. Being able to find his way back was not high on his priorities anymore. He had to start paying attention, however, when he walked straight into a wall.

He took a few steps back and looked. Definitely a wall. The corridor dead-ended, it seemed. He checked his screwdriver and his makeshift triangulation device. No faults; the signal was coming from here. Somewhere. He looked for a transmitter protruding anywhere from the wall. Nothing. Just a lighting strip along the top and bottom and smooth wall in between.

"Huh," he grunted confusedly.

And then, out of nowhere, a door opened up in the wall. Well, to call it a door was being generous. It was a dark slit, really; a roughly Doctor-sized tunnel that silently appeared in the middle of the plain, featureless wall. The Doctor blinked several times, wondering if it had a physical door at all, or had been concealed by some kind of energy shield that had been turned off. And what had triggered it? _Huh_ didn't count as a password or a command, did it?

To add to the mystery, the pile of machinery in his hands chose that moment to inexplicably shut down. He gave it a shake, tweaked a couple of wires, but it stayed dead. The Doctor looked back up from the electronics to the small door and couldn't dismiss the suspicion that all this was being very deliberately timed for his benefit. After all the effort and red herrings these beings—whoever they were—had seeded in order to keep their real identity hidden, was he now to believe that they were inviting him in to find the truth? It was probably a trap. The Doctor could imagine walking into that tiny slit and ending up sealed inside the wall, suffocating to death.

The Doctor detached the sonic screwdriver from the pile of circuitry and approached the slit. He poked his torso inside, thumbing the torch end of the screwdriver on. The tunnel was long. He could feel a vague breeze caused by recycled air being pumped through vents. Not a very likely tomb. He adjusted the setting on the screwdriver and scanned again. The screwdriver's range was limited, but by its high frequency buzzing he could tell that there was some kind of power source at the end of this tunnel. And possibly life signs, though the screwdriver lacked the facility to differentiate the energies definitively at this distance.

The Doctor looked behind him. Nowhere else to go, really. Turning the torchlight back on, he stepped fully into the aperture. The tunnel remained open, as if it were aware of its foreboding qualities and seeking to nullify his concern. The Doctor drew a deep breath of the cool air. "All right, then. How far does the rabbit hole go?" he murmured.


	36. Part 36

Miranda came to with a sharp breath and a nasty chemical tingle in her nose. She coughed and sat up, remembering belatedly that she had suffered abdominal injuries. The new pain, coupled with her general irritation at having been unconscious again, was an even more invigorating sensation than the smelling salts.

"Ammonium carbonate. Wonderful stuff," Scarf said cheerfully.

Miranda rubbed her nose furiously and was sorely tempted to deck the loony old man. He'd brought her all the way back to the lab before reviving her.

"Boy, I wish I could have seen that," the eager voice of Ace chimed in from the background.

"Seen what?" Miranda asked.

"The exploding not-Dalek we encountered," Scarf explained succinctly, pulling his tattered brown bag out of his coat. "Here, have a jelly baby."

"I'm not falling for that one again," Miranda growled.

"Are you sure? They're quite tasty," Scarf responded, reaching into the bag and pulling out—incredibly—a small, bright red piece of candy. "And they might help with your headache."

"How'd you—?"

"You haven't eaten since you arrived here, and adjusting to the time constriction means your metabolism has been kicked up a few notches, resulting in low blood sugar. Happens to the best of us. Please, have a jelly baby."

Miranda took the candy reluctantly. It seemed similar to a gummy bear, but larger and coated with confectioner's sugar. She popped it into her mouth and chewed experimentally, surprised to find that the texture was far softer and more granulated than she had expected. She couldn't decide if she liked it or not, but it was sweet and fruity-flavoured, and once the candy hit her tongue she realized she actually was rather hungry.

"Good?" Scarf asked eagerly.

Miranda shrugged noncommittally.

"Well, think it over," he said, plopping the entire bag onto her lap.

Miranda startled slightly, but it was just enough muscle movement to aggravate her tender gut. She drew in a sharp breath and pressed a fist into her side, trying to dull the pain.

"Now will you please let me out?" a muffled voice squeaked suddenly.

Ace rolled her eyes and Miranda looked to see that Goran was imprisoned inside his torture tube across the lab, feebly pounding on the clear lid. The sight was strangely comical and Miranda started to chuckle, but her insides promptly scolded her for it. "Ow," she groaned, lying back on the table again.

"If she's been wounded, my equipment can help! Let me out, please!" Goran pleaded.

"Will you shut it?" Ace snapped.

"Now, now. No need to be hasty," Scarf scolded.

"He tried to kill you." Ace was blunt.

"And I'm really sorry about that, but I can help her! I can! I have medical scanners and tissue regenerators and everything!"

"Do you really?" Scarf mused.

"We can't trust him, Doctor," Ace insisted.

"Clearly not," he agreed. "Luckily, I have extensive experience with laboratory equipment. Shouldn't be too difficult to figure out how all this works."

Miranda groaned loudly, unimpressed and hurting.

"You won't succeed," Goran insisted.

"I'm the Doctor. I always succeed. Eventually."

"No, I mean the equipment in here is all locked with isomorphic controls. Only I can operate any of it."

"Bollocks," Ace exclaimed.

"And it's all thoroughly sonic screwdriver-proof, to boot."

Miranda heard Scarf sigh. "You really are one of the most inconvenient people I've ever known, Goran."

"I'm a simple creature, Doctor, just trying to get by. Really. I'm not a monster. I'm sorry, but if she's been shot the way you say, she could have serious internal injuries. You need me."

Oh, enough of this! Miranda forced herself to sit up. "Never mind all of that. Just get me a bottle of that essence stuff and I'll be fine again."

"I can't, it's all been disposed of," Goran said flatly.

Scarf stood, tapping his lips, brooding in Goran's general direction. "Well then, I guess we've no other choice." He walked over to the tube and placed a hand near the latch. "This is your last chance, Goran."

Goran nodded.

Ace glanced at Miranda. Miranda was equally dubious, but also reminded herself that Goran was as consistent in his desire to help her as he was in capturing the Doctors. It was a calculated risk.

Scarf opened the lid of the tube and offered Goran his hand. Goran smiled, accepted it and climbed out of the tube. He clasped the Doctor's arm with both hands gratefully. "Thank you, Doctor," he said. Then he sidestepped, pulled hard, and sent Scarf tumbling over the side into the tube. He raced to his control panel and locked the lid of the tube in place.

"Hey! You—!" Ace rushed towards him. Goran reached into the pocket of his lab coat, pulled out a small device, aimed it at Ace, and pressed a trigger. Miranda watched, stunned, as Ace stopped short, grabbed her shoulder, and fell flat. He swivelled quickly to draw on Miranda.

"Don't even think about, little human, or I'll do the same to you!"

Miranda's heart thumped loudly in her ears, desperately wishing she were still unconscious and none of this was actually happening. "You killed her!"

"What? This is tranquilliser," Goran said as he strolled up to Miranda and pressed the nozzle against her neck. He deftly strapped her to the table with his free hand and then backed off towards the tube.

"You horrible little man! You gave your word!" Miranda cried, furious at her forced impotence, and insulted that he didn't even consider her enough of a menace to dose her on principle.

"And I'm going to keep it. Like I said, I'm out of essence. Your Doctor's insistence that I save you turned out to be just the incentive I needed to finally complete my task. Just as soon as I've set up the controls here to collect more, I'll tend to your injuries."

"What're you talking about?" Miranda demanded.

"Goran, don't do this," Scarf said.

Miranda heard worry in his normally deep, comforting voice.

"It won't kill you, Doctor. But if you try to fight it, it will make the process that much more unpleasant for you," Goran said, sounding disturbingly confident.

"What are you going to do?" she asked again.

"What I've been trying to do ever since I was dragged into this dreadful place! I'm going to infuse the incubation chambers with the Doctor's essence, and since they've been genetically modified with Time lord DNA, it should bond permanently, enabling them to regenerate damaged tissue endlessly!"

Miranda thought back to her conversation with Kamelion. The android was right! These Dalek impersonators were after the Doctor's regenerating ability. And though not Daleks, they were still likely intending to put some major hurt on the rest of universe. Miranda was not mathematically inclined, but aliens with plans for universal domination, with the added ability to survive massive injury and lots of numbers on their side, equalled an alien menace that was going to be major trouble.

"Goran, please, think about what you're going to do," Scarf pleaded.

"I have! I'm an idiot for not seeing the solution sooner. You can't say anything to dissuade me. I was taken out of my home, away from my family, my world and my work to do this. It's taken my entire life. All I've ever wanted was to get home. Now, if I succeed at this, I finally can!" Goran threw the lever to its highest setting.

"No!" Miranda cried.

The air erupted in a massive crackle of electricity. Scarf screamed and writhed, and the tube began to glow. Goran moved to the other side of the tube and made a few adjustments, and the glowing substance began to filter up out of the tube, through a pair of pipes rigged to the top, into a sizable tank of liquid rigged onto the wall behind the tube.

Miranda's head felt like it was going to explode from the massive vibration of thumping machinery and the Doctor's awful cries. "Stop! Stop, Goran, you're hurting him!" she screamed. But the little rat man was too occupied maintaining the torture chamber. Even from across the room, Miranda could see the glow from the tube reflecting in Goran's transfixed eyes.

Scarf continued to scream. So much of his essence was pouring out into the tube and up the pipes that it soon completely obscured his convulsing body. Miranda couldn't stand it, her own discomfort completely forgotten. She had to do something. She tugged on the restraint on her arm, but it was metal and locked firmly in place. She looked around desperately.

And then she saw it. At the foot of the examination table, on a cart, was Goran's tranquilliser gun. He'd set it there after strapping her arms. But he hadn't strapped her feet in. Seeing that he was still busy with Scarf, Miranda bit her lip, scooted as far down the table as she could, and stretched towards the cart. She could just barely slide the toe of her sneaker under the top of the cart, but it was enough. She used her foot to drag the cart up until she could grab the edge of it with her hands.

But the gun was lying in the centre of the cart, and she couldn't reach it with her wrists bound. Hoping her rudimentary understanding of physics was accurate, she jostled the cart forward, and the gun slid backwards on the metal surface, near to her fingers.

Yes!

She jostled the cart again, and the gun skittered to within her grasp. "Gotcha!" she exclaimed.

Her voice carried, and Goran turned. He started to approach her quickly. "What did you--?" Miranda aimed and pulled the trigger. Goran tried to duck, and instead of striking his chest where she'd aimed, he took the dart right to the neck. His surprised eyes unfocused and he toppled to the floor before he could finish his sentence.

"I said 'gotcha!'" Miranda sneered.

Any sense of accomplishment immediately vanished when she realized she was still strapped down and there was no one else in the room now able to shut off the torture tube. Again, the massive buzzing of the machine and Scarf's cries of agony tore at her. She tugged desperately at the restraint holding her wrists. She realized that the examination table she was laying on was actually a cart, as well, and tried to use her feet to push off the wall. But it was a heavy cart and she couldn't get sufficient leverage with her feet. She went back to fighting the restraints, utterly sick and tired of all of this. _Please, God,_ she found herself pleading, _just give me a freakin' break, already!_

No sooner had the thought entered her mind than something amazing happened. As she pulled her left wrist against the restraint, the metal seemed to give, and suddenly her hand was free. Miranda didn't waste time marvelling, and turned to her right wrist. But that restraint refused to loosen.

The Doctor was still screaming.

_No time. Screw it._ Miranda slid off the cart; her right arm still buckled fast, and leveraging all her weight behind it, got the metal cart moving. Her abdomen spiked with pain, but she didn't stop. She raced across the lab, braced herself, and let the cart smash into the bank of machinery beside the torture tube. There was an explosion of sparks. Miranda had time to think, _oh, bad_. And then pain almost as bad as the Dalek ray gun's charged through her trapped wrist and through her body with unbelievable intensity. The entire lab went dark, and the next thing she was sure of was that she was on the floor.


	37. Part 37

Miranda tingled painfully all over, as if her entire body had fallen asleep. Lights began to flicker back on, and Miranda remembered where she was. The Doctor! Her muscles felt rubbery and sore, but she forced herself to get up. She winced, noticing a nasty burn ringing her right wrist. She looked at the cart. The restraint seemed to have been blown open by the electrical current. Feeling shaky and strange, she got some relief from seeing that the tube and its associated controls were completely deactivated.

"Doctor?" she called out, seeing that the tube was still swirling with glowing Time Lord essence. She saw no movement within.

"_Hunnngh_." Miranda turned and saw Ace start to wake up. She held her head with one hand and staggered to her feet, blinking groggily at Miranda. "Blimey, what happened?"

"You okay?" Miranda asked, feeling foggy on that last point, herself.

Ace grimaced. "Yeah. You?"

"Little electrocuted, I think, but otherwise...help me get the Doctor out." Miranda indicated the disturbingly quiet tube.

Ace stared at the wreck that was formerly Goran's machinery. "Blimey," she said again, shaking her head. "I keep missing all the best bits!"

Miranda shuffled achingly over to the tube, trying to see how the thing latched. "Scarf? Doctor? Can you hear me? Are you okay?"

"I hear you."

The voice sounded strained, and very soft, but Miranda sighed in relief. She patted the tube. "Okay. Ace and I are going to get you out of here."

Ace joined her at the tube, and together they figured out how to release the clamps holding it shut. Miranda let Ace do the actual work of lifting it open, and both of them instinctively stepped back as the tingly essence vapours spilled out and dissipated in the air. Miranda chanced inhaling some of them, hoping for a little pick-me-up after everything she'd just gone through.

"Miranda, look!" Ace suddenly exclaimed.

Miranda opened her eyes and looked into the tube. "What the—?"

The Doctor was gone. His clothes, including his big hat and tattered scarf, lay crumpled in the bottom of the tube, but there was no sign of his actual person.

"He disintegrated!" Ace gasped.

"No way," Miranda spluttered.

"He must have." Ace looked panic-stricken.

"But he just spoke!" Miranda was beginning to feel likewise.

"Then where'd he go?"

Miranda stared at the pile of clothes in growing horror. She had no answer.

The pile moved. "I haven't gone anywhere!" Scarf's voice—sounding weak and a little distorted—cried. Then a tiny, wrinkled hand reached out from under the brim of Scarf's hat and shifted it aside.

Miranda and Ace shrieked.

"Is it really that bad?" the tiny creature asked, with Scarf's voice.

Miranda honestly didn't know what to say. It looked—for lack of a better word, --like a gremlin. Papery thin, greyish skin, a large, hairless head with a pair of astonishingly big, rheumy eyes on either side of a beaked nose that blinked at her with open intelligence. It bore a weird resemblance to Scarf, and when it spoke again, it had his distinctive, toothy mouth. "Well, don't just stand there gaping at me!"

"What happened to you?" Ace demanded.

The little gremlin-Scarf glanced down at himself briefly, and then glared at her. "Isn't it obvious? I'm old!"

"You're tiny," Ace said, sounding as though she were still trying to convince herself.

"I've been deprived of my essence. We Time lords can live a very long time even without completely regenerating, but this is what happens to us when we do."

"Can we fix it? If we give you your essence back, can we—?" Ace's question was cut off abruptly by the sudden pinging of an alarm. "Now what?"

"Must be a security alert, probably initiated when you demolished these controls," the mini-Doctor said.

"Well, no worries, then. All the androids are gone," Ace shrugged.

Miranda felt her insides start to shrivel up, and she turned to an adjacent bank of machinery that hadn't been damaged by her cart. She watched one of the screens display something like looked suspiciously like a schematic. Several areas of it were blinking. "But there's still the Dalek robots. And they don't fool around," she intoned worriedly.

"And there're those incubation chambers. What if you didn't turn this thing off in time?" Ace added.

Miranda felt like crying, but instead just drew a deep breath and sighed. "Never a dull moment, is there?"

"Quickly, let's get to the TARDIS," Scarf squeaked. "We'll be safest there."

Thankful for another brain, Miranda nodded. "That works for me." Turning back to the tube, she saw Goran still lying on the floor, unconscious.

"Will one of you mind giving me a lift? I regret to say my legs seem a fair bit shorter than yours, presently," Scarf remarked wryly.

Miranda experienced a moment of squicky uncertainty, but brushed it aside. "No problem. Ace, can you toss Goran in here for safekeeping?"

"Gladly."

"Fantastic. Doctor, if you'll excuse me..." Miranda apologised gently as she reached for the baby-sized Time Lord.

"One moment," he said. He quickly wrapped himself in his scarf for decency and donned his hat for style before allowing her to pick him up.

Ace began to drag Goran towards the tube.

"My sonic screwdriver!" the Doctor interrupted.

Ace quickly rifled through the pockets of his discarded coat and tossed said object at Miranda. The Doctor caught it quickly from his perch in Miranda's arms. Ace threw Goran into the tube and latched it shut with a satisfied flourish. "Let's get out of here!"


	38. Part 38

The tunnel was long, and the Doctor's patience was short. Why had this door opened? Why was he being permitted to stroll down this dark corridor, unmolested? He strongly sensed a trap, and as the moments ticked by, and each step proceeded without incident, his paranoia mounted. Mounted, to the point that when he could make out a sealed junction up ahead, he stopped, and began to feel relieved at the prospect of turning around and leaving.

Did it really matter who these aliens were, anyway? He should be back with the TARDIS, helping his other selves repair it and get in synch with the time corridor so they could go back to where they belonged. They needed him. Miranda needed him. The last thing he should be doing was sneaking around a dark tunnel, tempting the wrath of some unseen bogeyman. Miranda was right, he was vulnerable in this place. Curiosity was not an asset right now.

Yet, he could feel his feet itching to go on. The junction ahead was sealed--but was it a deadlocked seal? What was beyond it? Knowing who these beings were could prove an invaluable tool towards escaping. And why impersonate a Dalek? Why any of this?

The questions wriggled annoyingly in the back of his mind. The answers could be just a little further on. He had to know. How could live with himself if he didn't?

The Doctor toyed with his sonic screwdriver, stared at the sealed junction, and made his decision. He was going to go back. The time for curiosity was long passed. All that mattered was shutting this place down and getting everything back to normal. His questions would have to go unanswered; there was simply too much at stake.

He sighed, realizing that not only was he taking a rare course of action, but that he wasn't particularly dismayed by it. There was a time when almost nothing could have overruled his curiosity. "I really must be getting old," he muttered to himself. With a final, longing look at the sealed junction, he turned his back to it.

And was promptly swallowed by chaos.

It started as a sudden, blaring klaxon that made his whole head ring. He jumped and covered his ears. His legs sprang into action, and he was running for the exit almost before he realized it. Then the door disappeared, and he was swallowed in utter darkness. He skidded to a halt, losing track of how far ahead the door had been. The klaxon continued to sound as he turned on the torch and searched desperately for the seal. Then, all around him, lights began turning on, each with the loud crash of electricity snapping into cold circuits.

He fumbled madly for the vanished door, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned, and felt his hearts chill with horror. The lights were not just lights. They were incubation chambers. On both sides, lining each wall. Through large, round portholes he could see shifting shadows caused by limbs moving in front of the bluish light source. Chambers continued to light up sequentially all the way down the corridor.

The klaxon finally subsided, but the Doctor's own internal alarms were now screaming. He gave up on the door and turned his sonic screwdriver on the nearest porthole and took several readings. The screwdriver's capabilities were limited, and though he couldn't identify the species, one thing was abundantly clear: it was maturing, very quickly, and giving off traces of artron energy. The Doctor pressed a hand to the porthole, and felt his skin start to warm and tingle.

"Oh, clever Goran!" he moaned. The artron energy was his own. Goran had used it to revive Miranda, and now he'd used it to complete his objective, at last. The Doctor was not above pounding his forehead against the porthole in self-loathing. "And stupid me!" he wailed, realizing his effort to motivate Goran meant he was now partly responsible for this.

The porthole suddenly pounded back.

The Doctor jumped away from it in surprise, watching in growing horror as the fuzzy, indistinct shadows from within began to hurl themselves at the porthole. He could hear distant, smothered shrieks. His blood turned to ice at the sound. There was something familiar, and terrible, about it. All around him, more of the incubating creatures began to claw at the portholes, adding their shrieks to the terrifying chorus.

They were going to get out. They were nearly mature already, and if they didn't physically break out, the chambers would likely release them. The Doctor lunged at the disappeared door again, furiously trying setting after setting on his sonic screwdriver to get it to open again. But he couldn't even detect a seam where a door might have joined the wall. It was as if the wall had literally closed up. The shrieks were louder now. The Doctor experienced a moment of panic as he began to accept that the door was really, inexplicably gone.

Then the incubation chamber beside him emitted a series of loud clicks. It was opening.

The sealed junction! The Doctor spun around and raced back towards the junction. It was his only hope. A primal instinct in his gut told him unequivocally that these beings, whatever they were, were not the negotiating type. The other portholes began unlocking, in the same sequence they'd lit up. The Doctor was barely able to outrun it. _Please, don't be deadlocked, please don't be deadlocked!_

He charged the junction, screwdriver pointed, flicking settings like a man possessed. "Come on, come on!" he cried.

Reluctantly, the junction door began to creep open, the stressed metal adding its scream to the building cacophony around him.

"Yes! Little more! Little more!" he coaxed in a shrill panic, amplifying the screwdriver's signal.

The door shuddered, screamed again, and creaked apart. Just enough apart that when the Doctor heard the creatures begin to emerge behind him, he leapt for the opening and managed to squeeze himself through.


	39. Part 39

The Doctor pulled the metal door shut with a loud clang, the reverb accentuated by the sounds of furious bodies impacting the other side. Collecting himself quickly, he turned face-first into a dense cloud of vapours. Jigging the door opened must have ruptured a ventilation line of some kind, he figured, thumbing his light on again. He heard no hissing to indicate a leak, however, and the mist scattered his light into a fuzzy orb of blue uselessness. He inched forward, groping for the walls of the tight corridor, but felt none.

"Now, what's this all about?" he mused aloud, even as a terribly plausible explanation occurred to him. _Must be getting close_. His hearts thrumming nervously, he edged onward, uncertain of what he was going to find on the other side, and feeling his blood rise in excitement.

He reached into his pocket and felt the can of nitro nestled into his pocket. Just in case...

The mist began to clear. The Doctor took a bold step forward...and found himself adrift in space. Stars and planets streamed past his face and all around him, parting like an eddy in a stream. He nearly lost his balance in the disorienting onslaught, realizing that he couldn't possibly be in space for two very immediate reasons. One, he was still standing on a solid floor, and two, the planets and stars were all impossibly small. As he fixated on one particular solar system whizzing past his face, he noticed that its planets were orbiting rapidly, their weather patterns shifting in the blink of an eye. One of them abruptly became surrounded by tiny artificial satellites. Another appeared to be writhing with worms that were actually hundreds of missile launches.

The air was full of celestial bodies, and they flowed over and through him like the mere spectres they were. This, the Doctor realized, was the universe in miniature. A vast, three-dimensional map projection.

The Doctor stood in awe of it all, watching the countless stars and galaxies swirl around him. He couldn't make out the edges of the room. He saw no walls and no ceiling, and looking down, he was startled to note that the apparently solid, unyielding floor beneath his feet was just as imperceptible. He looked down, and saw only more galaxies, some near, some distant, all swirling in their unique, long-established rhythms.

In all this majestic motion, the Doctor soon realized that there was something else in the room that wasn't moving. Something alive. The Doctor approached silently, and realized that the pivot around which this time-lapsed microcosm was orbiting was a robed figure, standing still, his back to the Doctor, arms stretched out to the sides as if in worship.

"...Hullo?" the Doctor queried softly, loathe to interrupt this fascinating display.

All at once, the figure dropped his arms to his side, and the vast projection winked out of existence. The Doctor was disoriented as the room was plunged into inky black. Then, one at a time, several orbs of light bobbed out of nowhere and began to hover like insects, gradually lighting the room like a set of small moons.

"Doctor," the robed figure said, turning around. An orb hovered over his head, casting his face into dramatic shadow.

"You!"

The robed man glared at the Doctor with a defiant set to his strong jaw, his eyes glittering in the half-light. "An interesting pronominal choice, Doctor." With an almost casual flick of his wrist, the vast expanse of tiny galaxies reappeared. "But tell me," the Valeyard continued, "how do you like my little universe?"


	40. Part 40

_Gotta find the Doctor. Gotta help him. Find him quick before things get worse_, Miranda's mind urged as she ran. Shouldn't have left him alone so much. Shouldn't have used him as such a time-travelling taxi service.

The alarms continued to sound all around her. Damn tertiary defence system! Miranda hoped desperately that Ace and the shrunken Doctor were making good time to the TARDIS room. She clutched tightly at her can of nitro nine, hoping also that she remembered Ace's instructions on how to use it properly. (Though, given how her day was going so far, she wouldn't have been at all surprised to end it by accidentally blowing herself up.)

She flew around a corner, tripped over a pile of smouldering Dalek bits and just barely didn't fall over. Catching herself, she heard the unmistakable whoosh of a door opening. Looking up eagerly, Miranda shrieked. It was too late; the creatures were done.

Miranda forgot about the explosive in her hands as she watched them emerge from the incubation chamber. The first blinked its single lavender eye, clearly adjusting to the bright, clinical light of the corridor, and paused to shield its face with a long arm that ended in a tuft of tentacles rather than a hand. Its posture reminded Miranda of a gorilla. A glistening, purplish, one-eyed gorilla with a short mane of pinkish tentacles, in a suit of greenish battle armour.

The sight was so utterly remarkable that Miranda just stood in the middle of the hallway and gaped at it. The purplish gorilla-thing opened its mouth and grunted distastefully at the light. A second purplish gorilla-thing emerged beside it and grunted in apparent agreement. Then, the first one looked at Miranda and grunted in surprise.

Crap.

Miranda braced herself to run. On the surface, everything about the situation seemed to support running as the best course of action, but the fact that the gorilla-things were apparently in no hurry, and moreover, seemed to project nothing more sinister than an air of curiosity, stayed her feet. For once, Miranda decided, she was going to take a page out of the Doctor's handbook. The gorilla things continued to step out into the hallway, and one by one, they all turned to eye her. And Miranda stood fast and eyed them back. The lead gorilla-thing looked at its compatriots a bit uncomfortably, and then cautiously started towards Miranda.

Miranda's heart jumped to her throat, but she forced herself to stay still. Her evidence was intangible, but something inside was almost certain that, in spite of everything, these creatures did not intend her any harm. Yet.

She didn't move as the gorilla-thing stepped right up to her. She didn't move as it leaned in and sniffed her shirt with a long, delicately bridged nose. And she moved only the tiniest bit when it poked her forehead with one of its tentacle fingers.

Then, (hand trembling) Miranda poked the gorilla-thing back.

The gorilla-thing jumped, causing Miranda to do the same. A stir went through the observing gorilla-things. The lead gorilla-thing studied her nervously, but did not appear upset, so Miranda decided to test her hypothesis a bit further. "H-hello," she said.

The gorilla-things reacted more strongly to that. The lead one stared at Miranda in slack-jawed wonder, and touched its own lips.

"Can you talk?" Miranda continued, tapping her mouth.

The lead gorilla-thing tapped its mouth in imitation, and the others behind it followed suit.

Miranda was starting to feel a little more confident, realizing that she'd practically expected this. These beings, whatever they were, were newborn. Like Sontarans. Grown to maturity in an incubator, and even pre-programmed. But there was only so much a nascent brain could absorb at once, and so even a born soldier needed some amount of training up, to learn to use the neural pathways it had been given.

"My name is Miranda," she went on, tapping her chest. "Miranda."

The lead gorilla-thing stared at her with an increasingly discerning eye. It opened and closed its mouth a few times. "Ma-rahn-dah," it finally stuttered, eyeing her excitedly. Then it jabbed a finger at her, and exclaimed, "Miranda! I know Miranda!"

"Yes, hi. Nice to meet you," Miranda said, feeling quite proud of herself.

"Meet? No meet. Know you. Yes," the gorilla-thing said, nodding vigorously. "Know Miranda long."

"What?" Miranda asked, misunderstanding.

"And...Ace! Know Ace. And...Kamelion. And TARDIS. We go in TARDIS lots, meet Sontarans and Master-boy. Then you gone long time. Remember Miranda?" the gorilla-thing insisted eagerly. Behind it, the other creatures started nodding in agreement.

Miranda was struck dumb. How could it≈they≈possibly know any of that? "Who are you?" she demanded.

"Know that, too! Yes! My name Doctor," the lead gorilla-thing jabbered happily. Drawing itself up onto two legs, it patted its green armour and made a noise clearly intended to be a chuckle. "I regenerated again, see?" It turned to chuckle at its comrades, and they, too, started examining each other and chuckling in amusement.

Miranda's jaw dropped. I'm still unconscious, she decided. I'm still passed out in Goran's lab, and this is a dream. "So...so, then, who are they?" she spluttered, pointing to the group of other gorilla-things clustering in the corridor.

The lead gorilla-thing looked them over, turned back to Miranda and shrugged. "In a word, me."


	41. Part 41

"This is impossible," the Doctor declared.

"Oh, not this simple display, of course. I mean this place. Surely you've figured out what it is by now."

"But this is impossible," the Doctor insisted.

"Finding a charged vacuum emboitment is hardly a common occurrence, but there remain a fair few of them scattered about the cosmos, fortunately," the Valeyard continued, conversationally. "If one knows where to look."

"But this just isn't possible!" the Doctor repeated furiously.

"Impossible? Isn't that what the council believed about the destruction of Gallifrey?" the Valeyard volleyed back, his tiny universe blazing back into existence.

The name bore down on the Doctor like a massive, dead weight. _Were it anywhere else, it would have looked beautiful, the kaleidoscope of colors as atmospheric gases ignited, the brilliant red orange glow of the planet's heart..._.

"Don't," he said.

But the Valeyard continued. "Still, the end came, didn't it?" He held out a hand, and one innocuous, orange sphere soared down to hover over his palm. He smiled and watched it. "Everything dies. But the old fools were desperate for another possibility. Curious how a thing could be of so little personal value while it exists, yet lay so mighty a weight upon our shoulders by its absence, don't you agree, Doctor?" He shook his head sadly at the little orbiting hologram. "The universe must scarcely notice. Even now...it's been so long."

_"Oh, it's ages since we've seen our planet. It's quite like Earth, but at night the sky is a burnt orange; and the leaves on the trees are bright silver..." _Not long enough. "Just stop it!" the Doctor cried. Addressing the room at large, he announced, "You hear me? I'm not falling for it this time!"

"Who are you shouting at?" the Valeyard asked, abandoning his god-like pose to look puzzled.

"Whoever's stupid little game this is! I'll grant you, the Daleks were a clever trick, but this--" the Doctor levelled a finger at the Valeyard as he continued his skyward rant, "—this is just ridiculous!"

"Doctor—"

"There's no point in it," the Doctor continued, ignoring the Valeyard completely. "I've infiltrated your defences as far as they go, so why don't you just come out and face me? None of us is getting any younger!"

"You're only embarrassing yourself, Doctor. I promise you, I am as real as you are, and this 'neat little prison,' as you call it, is indeed the product of my own invention," the Valeyard interrupted sharply. "Think about it; who else could possibly know of my existence? I was made as a tool of the High Council, which, we both know, has long been destroyed. Just like all the rest."

No! He tried to block it out, tried to stop himself from remembering_...the brilliant red orange glow of the planet's heart, the moment of silent, breathless wonder as it grew brighter... _

Taking obvious advantage, the Valeyard began to approach him, slowly circling like the predator he was. "Who else could know what it was like to watch as Gallifrey's atmosphere ignited like a glowing ember?"

_...before it all came apart in a flash so bright it burned..._

"How it felt to sense all of those kindred minds screaming inside my head as I watched from afar, paralyzed in horror as everything I fought to defend was destroyed?"

_...the deafening roar of like minds as their end hung in space for one suspended second... _

"How I spent the years after searching for proof that I wasn't alone. And how I tried, and failed, again and again, to put it right..." The Valeyard paused, right beside the Doctor's ear. "...Until finally, I even lost myself."

_...How appropriate_. The Doctor stood frozen, fists clenched at his sides, desperate to stop the onslaught of memories. The open wound bled through his mind with painful freshness, and it was all he could do to resist crumbling under it. Again.

"I know your burden all too intimately, Doctor, for I share in it. When the war came, the council felt they had no choice but to look to the future. They saw Gallifrey's destruction and they were terrified. And yet, they also saw that you still existed in spite of it." The Valeyard tilted his head, pausing dramatically. "'Then perhaps this is only one possibility,' they thought. 'If the Doctor survives, then so must we.' And so they resurrected me," the Valeyard explained, "Not just in spirit, but in body. As a projection, I could see but through a mirror darkly."

He backed away from the Doctor and spread his arms. "And so, the word was made flesh. And in so doing, they doomed themselves. For, once actualized, my time line became just as real as my body. And I remember you, Doctor."

The Doctor accepted this revelation with all due horror. If he was speaking truthfully…. "They assumed my survival meant Gallifrey wouldn't be destroyed?" _Look at the great Doctor_._ ...W__hen it comes to your own home, you've failed. Again. Failed to protect it, failed to restore it._

The Valeyard looked away, appearing to struggle for composure. "It was _my_ fault, Doctor. Not yours."


	42. Part 42

Miranda took in the scene before her with growing dismay. "You have _got_ to be kidding me."

"Where my scarf? I give you jelly baby!" one of the newborn aliens said repeatedly as it wandered in a little circle around the group.

"Oh, wish for more colour in this, I do! No personality at all!" a second alien sighed, shaking its head despondently at its armour.

"But these shoes, they fit perfect!" a third exclaimed happily.

A fourth was staring intently at its reflection in the breastplate of a fifth. "Regeneration is trouble. Never know what you get," it grunted soberly.

Miranda groaned in realization. The essence! Goran programmed these things, all right; he inadvertently programmed them after the different forms of the Doctor! As she watched them chatter aimlessly with their borrowed personalities, Miranda found herself speaking her mind: "I almost wish it was Daleks."

"Daleks?!" the lead alien repeated, turning to glare at her (which had been looking at its reflection in the shiny corridor wall and commenting about its ears). "You know nothing about Daleks!" it snapped.

Miranda recoiled at the viciousness in its voice. "S-sorry. I didn't mean--What do you know about Daleks?" she asked suddenly, recovering her nerve. This lead alien seemed to be channelling her Doctor more than the others. If it really had absorbed some of his personality and his memories, then Miranda sensed an opportunity to have some questions laid to rest.

"Daleks kill. Killed everyone," the alien answered, clearly upset. "Killed my family, my home. All gone. Daleks!" it snarled.

The other aliens stopped to pay attention. "...Yes," one of the others nodded slowly, "I remember. Glowing ember in space."

"But the Daleks were gone, too," another chimed in. "It worked, remember?"

"But, home!" the second alien cried. "Home was gone!"

"Stop, stop! I know home was gone!" the lead alien shouted, silencing all of them. "I try to fix, and now see! See how I am! My own skin is failure for all to see!" With an anguished wail, the alien turned away from all the others and curled up on the floor, shuddering.

"...F-fail?" one of the others repeated weakly. It gazed at its tentacle hands and started to weep. "Fail!" it cried, pulling into a ball on the floor.

"Oh, no," Miranda groaned, as one by one, the aliens began to panic and collapse to the floor in self-loathing. The sight was as deeply disturbing as the revelation the lead alien had just described, and she found herself struggling to keep herself from being swept away in it. No wonder the Doctor never talked about home, and no wonder he'd reacted how he had when those Dalek casings first appeared. Miranda suddenly felt horribly guilty for not having recognized it sooner. She'd sensed there was something damaged about him for a long time, but she'd never have suspected it was anything like this. And now, all that trauma and all those repressed feelings were imprinted, naked and undeserved, onto these poor creatures. Some army!

-------------------------------------------

The Valeyard stepped toward the Doctor, eyes wide and glittering in the kaleidoscope light of his tiny universe. He reached out and just brushed the Doctor's arm. The Doctor jerked back violently, as if the Valeyard had grazed him with a hot poker. The Valeyard's presence screamed with wrongness; the Doctor had become so used to the mental dampening of this place that it was like an electric shock. He had no doubt anymore.

"You're completely insane," he said.

"Of course I am!" the Valeyard suddenly shouted, "I was born to it! I'm an impossibility inside a singularity wrapped up in the most destructive temporal paradox the universe has, had, and will ever know, Doctor!" With a wail of anguish, the Valeyard whirled away from the Doctor, thrashing at his miniature galaxies. "My mother was Gallifrey, and my birth killed her! Only here, caught between being and not being, in this..._boil_ on the wound of time, could I end the destruction and create the means with which to restore that which was taken," he continued, falling to his knees, and lifting his arms above his head. "'A peace above all earthly dignities, A still and quiet conscience,'" he quoted softly.

The swirl of stars and galaxies suddenly zoomed in towards his hands, coalescing into two large, glowing spheres. "Nothing corrodes the soul with quite the same efficacy as failure does," he said, as the large globes above his hands took on color and detail. "Something the poor denizens of these two worlds never really understood."

The Doctor recognized the two planets: Gallifrey on the left, and the original homeworld of the Daleks--Skaro--on the right. Two worlds both long gone, at his hands. He swallowed with difficulty. He had exactly zero patience for his un-self's mad ravings. "Yes, very nice picture show. That must be a top-of-the-line holo projector you've got there." A pair of noticeably loud thumps echoed through the chamber, originating behind the Doctor. He'd almost forgotten about them. "Now what say you call off your little Dalek army and send us all back home?"

The Valeyard stood slowly, the two large planets flanking him, hovering above his outstretched arms. He was staring up at them worshipfully. "That's exactly what I shall do, Doctor. It will all be made right." He looked at the Doctor again, his eyes clearing. "Shall I tell you why you failed, Doctor? I remember, of course. The dark time in that lonely void when all of it was gone. You tried to fix it. Attempt after attempt, always ending at the same mortal wound."

The Doctor crossed his arms. He didn't want to hear this. "Crazy or not, you do have a gift for gab, I'll grant you that." There were more thumps from the corridor behind him.

"Maybe it is because I am outside of your time, that I could see what you couldn't. Perhaps the council had a purpose in bringing me forth after all, albeit not the one they expected. 'Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.' You see...those beings out there aren't Daleks. They are made of the universe's oldest sentience, yet utterly new, and they shall be the saviour of all we have lost and so very much more," the Valeyard said, nodding towards the sealed hatch. His eyes gleamed mischeviously.

-------------------------------------------

"No, please, guys, pull yourselves together, huh?" Miranda tried to reassure the panicking creatures, both for their well-being, and for speed. She clutched the Nitro-Nine cannister tightly. She needed to find the Doctor _now_. But the things were lost in their anguish, huddling together and wailing piteously. "Please, I know it's hard, but that's all in the past. You gotta help me now. I need to find the real Doctor. I need your help to fix all this," she pleaded.

One of the creatures raised its head. "Fix? Can't fix, Miranda! That is problem!"

"No! Listen to me, I understand that what happened to you and your people was horrible, but I need your help to fix things here and now. You've got to..." _To what?_ She was flying by the seat of her pants, here. "To get yourselves, and all the rest of you that are in this facility, to...uh, help us get out. Me, all those other friends of yours that Goran hid away in the TARDISes, we need your help, see?"

The creature eyed her thoughtfully. "Goran," it said.

Miranda smiled, encouraged. "Yeah, remember him? He hid--"

The creature suddenly leapt to its feet, drawing the attention of the others. "Goran's fault!" it proclaimed angrily. "Yes, Miranda! Goran did it! We help! We get Goran for this!"

The other creatures began to rapidly recover from their breakdowns and join the ringleader in angry solidarity. "Goran!" they all began to chorus, transforming the name into a threatening invective. They were riled, and if their building fury at Goran was as potent as their terror had been...

Miranda felt her control of the situation dissolve with frightening speed. "Whoa, now, wait a second! What are you--?"

"Goran abused us! Made us age, made you die! We more powerful than him!" the lead creature growled.

"We superior!" the others began to chant. "We get Goran! We get all of us and we terminate Goran! Terminate! Terminate!"

Suddenly Miranda faced a mob. Her pleas for mercy and patience were drowned out, and she could hear the chilling word spreading back into the incubation chamber. There were a lot more of them in there than she had suspected. "Terminate Goran!" the lead creature screamed, and the group began to surge past her, back towards the laboratory.

-------------------------------------------

The Valeyard slowly brought his hands together, guiding the two planets closer and closer until they merged into one over his head. "It is so simple, can't you see? Mutually assured survival. I scoured the timelines, Doctor, and in every one of them I saw the Time Lords and the Daleks, locked in mortal combat. They only way one can survive is if the other also survives. They must be one, Doctor! One world, and one race! Dalek and Time Lord, Gallifrey and Skaro, both and neither! That is the noble end that this entire endeavor has been striving towards!" The Valeyard spoke faster, fueled with the excitement of a purpose nearly fulfilled.

"I had the Dalek components, this place was theirs, a retreat from the devastation of the Time War. But for the other half...I am tainted, neither living, nor dead, nor entirely existant, for that matter, as you have perceived. I found you, so many of our fragments, ripe for distillation. Thanks to you, we can restore the universe, Doctor. But to do it, we must make such a change, so drastic that you never would have considered it. We cannot change the Time War, but we can prevent it. We must. For it is not just our lives and our people who suffered. How many worlds and peoples were lost, Doctor? We can restore them, but first we must evolve, Doctor! The Daleks and the Time Lords--two races blind to their own ancient stagnation. Two stars, dying in the universe. I have brought them together. And when I send them out in your TARDISes, they will flow back in time to when their mother races were but infants, and supplant them entirely with a hybrid creature that will never make such war upon the stars. They won't only close the scars of time, they will make it so they never happened. Only then will your pain--and this nebulous purgatory of mine--at last have a chance to subside."

The thumps behind the Doctor grew more insistent, accompanied by the squeal of strained metal. He glanced from the hatch, to the Valeyard, then back again. All he could think about was the brief contact in that corridor when he realized Goran had used his essence. "Those things...you made--?" He couldn't even say it, the idea was so hideous.

"A hybrid organism, Dalek and Time Lord, and the only way to repair the damage to the universe," the Valeyard reiterated gravely.

"You idiot!" the Doctor cried, applying it to himself, Goran and the Valeyard in varying measures. "Goran used regenerative essence on those things." The Valeyard looked at him with equal parts astonishment and confusion."They're not just hybrids, they're in biological meta-crisis, they're unstable. And they're_ half-Dalek_!" the Doctor emphasized.

The Valeyard lowered his arms and stood, as understanding slowly crept across his face. "But they are half Time Lord also. You assume that they will fall to the violent nature of the Dalek. But the restraint and mental superiority of a Time Lord, surely--"

"A Time Lord which was _me_," the Doctor said pointedly. He indicated the door hatch, which was starting to shudder in its frame. "Does that sound restrained to you?"

The Valeyard's chest began to heave. "They simply desire guidance and instruction," he protested sharply. "In that way they do follow the Dalek. But they will listen to me, Doctor. I'll open the hatch, and you'll see your prejudice disproved." The Valeyard began to walk towards the hatch. The Doctor moved quickly to block him.

"Either way, I can't let you do this."

"You cannot stop me. This is the future of the universe, I've seen it. I've planned for it. I've made it happen!" the Valeyard insisted in ever-angrier tones. He tried to sidestep around the Doctor, but the Doctor countered, pulling the cannister of Nitro-Nine out of his pocket. The Valeyard paused, looking at the disguised aerosol can. "You would do it."

"Like you said, you don't exist, and for all I know, I don't have any regenerations left. So...yeah." The Doctor grinned, enjoying the unsettled expression that flitted across the Valeyard's features. But staring at his face meant that the Doctor didn't notice the Valeyard's right fist until it was plowed into his midsection.

Winded, the Doctor doubled over and staggered. He managed to keep hold of the Nitro-Nine, but the Valeyard slipped past him and made a beeline for the stressed hatch. The Doctor's vision flashed red for a second and he just happened to catch himself on a wall that had appeared as invisible as the floor. As his diaphragm relaxed and he started to straighten, the Doctor noticed another hatch a few meters from him, in the invisible wall. He heard a loud crash behind him. The Valeyard's sucker punch had stunned him for only a few seconds, it seemed, but it was long enough for the Valeyard to reach the first hatch and trigger the opening mechanism.

"Don't!" the Doctor gasped.

-------------------------------------------

Jostled roughly in the stampede, Miranda shrieked and pressed herself flat against the wall. The armored creatures flowed past her in a torrent of murderous intent. Panic welled. There were scores of them, just in this one incubation room. One of them clipped her shoulder and and she nearly fell headlong into the crowd. She lost her grip on the nitro can, heard it clatter briefly on the floor, but it was quickly lost.

"Terminate! Terminate! Terminate!" the cry was practically a shriek and she covered her ears. They sounded so much like Daleks!

Great gods, what had she done? Goran was helpless in that tube. If those things got it open, got hold of him in their present frenzy...certainly the little rat man had done some despicable things, but he didn't deserve this! Her stomach lurched. Finally, the mob passed her by, barrelling down the corridor like crazed gorillas. She tried to call after them, screaming for them to stop. But they rounded the corner and were gone in a chilling, echoing wail of bloodlust. It wasn't just Goran she feared for, what if they ran into Ace and the shrunken Doctor on their way? This was bad. Her can of nitro was nowhere to be seen, either, probably snatched up by one those things. Crazed gorillas with _explosives_. Very, very bad.

She stared after them, her legs itching to run after and try to stop them somehow. But they weren't listening to reason and they had nearly trampeled her. Plus she was alone, unarmed and injured (as her trembling limbs and aching insides constantly reminded her). Her breath catching in a sob, Miranda made her decision: "Sorry, Goran." She turned, trying to remember the way back to the TARDIS room.

-------------------------------------------

The roar of the creatures' shrieking and pounding was instantly deafening as the hatch began to retract. The Valeyard stood before the growing aperature, his arms outstretched. "Please, children of Gallifrey and of Skaro! Calm yourselves! There is much work to be done!" Several grotesque figures began to come through, their true form hidden by the darkness, shrieking unintelligibly, reaching towards the Valeyard.

"You are in pain! We can make it end," the Valeyard cried, grasping the hand of the nearest creature. Swift as a fleeting shadow, the creatures set upon him. He was mobbed in a writhing mass of screaming darkness, limbs reaching, tearing, thrashing.

The Doctor triggered the fuse and threw the Nitro-Nine at the hatch. It exploded with a loud POP of dense, white smoke. Turning to the second hatch he'd just seen, the Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver and triggered the hatch's opening mechanism. The corridor beyond was dim, but deserted. The Doctor wasted no time in legging it through the aperature as more creatures filled the smoky room behind him, all making a horrifying sound the Doctor had only ever heard once before--the first time he'd watched his people die. As the hatch closed behind him though, he heard one scream that stood out from the others: the Valeyard's.


End file.
